


In Your Haunted Head

by follow_the_sun



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Ghosts, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Poltergeists, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Weird Shit, mention of past sexual abuse, the dog does not die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-10 20:56:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12307641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: Post-WS, Steve finds Bucky and brings him back home to recover. His relief doesn't last long. Recovery's hard when the house is trying to kill you.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThisThatAndTheOther](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisThatAndTheOther/gifts).



> Here's my entry for the 2017 Stucky Scary Bang! (Note that this is a horror challenge; please read the tags, as always.)
> 
>  **Prompt:** Some people say a poltergeist isn't a ghost at all but residual kinetic energy or "energy extensions" of someone living, especially when they're suffering from or repressing trauma. The chaotic and often violent phenomena are manifestations of this energy. If strong enough, it could eventually develop into a separate entity.  
>       Post-WS, Steve finally finds Bucky and brings him back home to recover. His relief doesn't last long. Recovery's hard when the house is trying to kill you. TL;DR: Bucky creates a poltergeist.

It could have been a disaster.

That’s the part Steve can’t get over: how horribly wrong the whole thing could have gone if things had been just a little bit different at any point. If he’d found Bucky’s hideout in Romania just a few days later, or if the business with the Sokovia Accords (which Steve signed _instantly_ after they sweetened the deal with full immunity for Bucky) had gone down just a few days earlier. How he somehow talked Bucky into leaving that shitty little Bucharest apartment just hours ahead of the SWAT team that raided the place and found it empty. How Bucky hesitantly turned over a notebook with the scribbled Cyrillic that only Natasha recognized as a reset code, and how Tony’s latest AI cracked the deep encryption in the dumped Hydra files to find the location of the red book—in Cleveland, of all places—that Sam recovered for them that very night.

Bucky never said so directly, but Steve could see that he was so afraid of that damn book, he didn’t even want to be in the same country with it. Sam ended up sending them a video clip of Wanda burning it to cinders while they watched from a hotel room in Leipzig. And while Steve had known for a long time that he has his own dark side—that the anger that carried him through those hard Depression years in Brooklyn has changed shape a hundred times without ever really going away—he was surprised to realize that he’d never known what it was to feel truly murderous until Bucky buried his face in his shoulder and let out one tiny, choked little sob when the video feed showed his old handler going out of the house in cuffs.

Still, Steve thinks the destruction of the Winter Soldier ledger was a turning point for Bucky, as well as for himself. The constant fear, the gnawing sense of Bucky’s absence (for obvious reasons, Steve won’t say it’s been like the ache of a phantom limb, but given that Bucky was in his life long before he got his hardened bones and enhanced muscles, how can he not feel that Bucky’s more a part of him than his own body?), finally started to dissipate when the book went up in scarlet flames. And the next day they got on the plane back to New York City, and for the first time in a long time, Steve let himself think that maybe things would be all right after all.

 

Steve can’t deny that he’s disappointed when he asks Bucky if he wants to go home, to Brooklyn, and Bucky shakes his head and mumbles, “Not yet.” But as it turns out, it’s an opportunity for life to hand them an unexpected gift.

“Peggy left you her house in her will,” he tells Bucky after he gets off the phone, swallowing the lump in his throat. “She said she never had the heart to sell it, and when you came back, she finally understood why—because she was holding it for you. She deeded it over to you just a few days before she died.”

It breaks his heart all over again to see how floored Bucky is by what Peggy considered a small gesture of recompense, her own poor attempt to make up for S.H.I.E.L.D.’s failure to help him. “I don’t deserve it,” he says, hoarse and raspy. “I don’t… I don’t even really remember her.”

Steve puts his hands on Bucky’s shoulders. “If there’s anybody who’d understand that, it’s Peggy. She loved you too, you know, in a way—she knew how important you were to me. _Are_ to me. We even talked about… after the war… all of us finding a place together. If, I don’t know, if you wanted to. I think this is her way of telling us it’s okay for you to be safe now. To be happy.”

“I don’t deserve that either,” Bucky mumbles, looking away.

Steve fights down another surge of anger—it’s never going to get easier seeing Bucky, the best person he’s ever known, hating himself for all the things he’s been forced to do. But he clenches his jaw and says, “Yes, you _do,_ Buck,” and Bucky manages a slightly forced half-smile.

“Where’s the house?” he says.

 

It’s just over an hour from the city by train, then a few more miles by car from the station. Once he’s pulled into the driveway and confirmed that the address on the slip of paper is the same as the one on the house, Steve gets out of the car and stares. It’s a lovingly maintained Queen Anne with white trim, huge bay windows, and a little brick path leading to a wide wraparound porch: exactly the sort of place he would have wanted Peggy to have when it was time for her to live her life and raise a family. It even smells like her, or rather, like the rosewater perfume she always wore when she could get it. That’s when he realizes the garden is full of rose bushes; it’s the tail end of summer and the season is long over, but there are a few late blossoms still holding on around the sheltered edges of the yard.

He wants so badly for Bucky to feel safe here. But Bucky still hasn’t gotten out of the car.

Steve walks around and leans down, crossing his arms against the doorframe. “Interest you in getting out of there any time?” he asks, and Bucky does the thing where he doesn’t quite laugh.

“Still waiting for orders, I guess,” he says, and pops the door handle, looking at Steve uncertainly. Seventy years, and Steve still hasn’t quite gotten used to Bucky looking up at him. “You know you don’t have to—”

“Don’t even finish that sentence,” Steve says. The couple of times he’s tried to hug Bucky since Bucharest haven’t gone great, so he stays back and puts on his best _watch your mouth, soldier_ glare. “The Avengers know where to call if the world starts to end. Short of that, you’re stuck with me.”

Bucky nods and gets out of the car. He looks more out of place here than he did in Manhattan, still in the same frayed jeans and beat-up jacket he brought with him from Bucharest, clutching his battered backpack like it’s some combination of shield and lifeline. But there’s no one around to notice; this is an old neighborhood where people mostly keep to themselves, Peggy said, and the wide, tree-lined street is empty. “It’s quiet,” he says.

“Is that good or bad?” Steve asks.

“Good?” Bucky says, making it a question. “I… think I like it.”

“If you don’t, we can find another place to—”

“No,” Bucky says. “I gotta stop running.”

“Okay.” Telegraphing his movements so he doesn’t come off as a threat, Steve reaches out and squeezes Bucky’s right shoulder. “Want to go pick out a bedroom?”

Bucky jumps like he’s been shocked. “I can’t—”

“For you, not for us,” Steve clarifies, and then, afraid he’s made it worse, he adds, “I mean, I’d love it if you wanted—but you should have a place of your own where you can go if things get rough, right? The house has six bedrooms; you can pick where we both sleep, if you want to. We can always change it later.”

Bucky nods and heads up the porch steps. He pauses at the door, holding the heavy bronze key on its loop—Steve has been insistent that the master key should stay with him, that the house is Bucky’s and they can get around to making him a copy any time. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Quit it,” Steve says. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

Bucky opens his mouth to say something else, but then he shakes his head, unlocks the door, and goes inside.

 

The house is just as graceful inside as out. The rooms are large and airy and full of light, and Steve follows Bucky as he explores them, watching his face light up at each new find: the clean kitchen with the huge chef’s range and refrigerator; the gleaming hardwood floor in the living room; the little windowed reading nook in the library that Bucky immediately, almost defiantly, claims as his own, as if there’s the slightest chance that Steve will try to kick him out of it. He makes it up by declaring that the sunny solarium, with its high windows, is Steve’s new art studio, blatantly ignoring Steve’s insistence that he hasn’t done any real art since before the War. Things get a little weird when they head upstairs; Bucky offhandedly chooses the smallest bedroom for himself but inspects the others closely, from multiple angles, before he assigns Steve to the one across the hall from him and starts to reconfigure the furniture. Steve makes the mistake of asking why and can’t help wincing when Bucky says, “Sightlines,” pointing at the window as if it should be obvious that he’s trying to protect Steve’s hapless ass from sniper fire. But he helps move the bed anyway, telling himself that anything that makes Bucky more comfortable is fine, and silently sets himself a new goal: one of these days Bucky is going to sleep soundly with all the windows open.

After the bedroom situation is resolved, there’s the issue of food to consider. Bucky hedges hard on either going into town or allowing Steve to order in, seeming to fear that even the delivery guy could be on a mission to assassinate Captain America, but the kid who eventually brings them two large bags of Chinese takeout shows no interest in anything but getting back to his text messages. They carry the food out to the back porch, where Steve discovers, to his astonishment, that he can see the Hudson River from his seat on a patio chair.

“Did you ever imagine we’d wind up in a place as fancy as this?” he asks Bucky, who barely seems to have noticed the view; he gave the yard a scan for threats, found none, and immediately switched focus to digging his chopsticks into a container of Szechuan beef.

“Fancy?” he scoffs, without looking up. “Are you kidding, Rogers? This dump doesn’t even have wi-fi.”

It takes Steve a full five seconds to register that Bucky has just made a joke, and his answering laugh is mostly relief. Mostly, but not all. Bucky sounds more like _his_ Bucky than he has since Steve found him. And honestly, Steve had no idea how much it was hurting him to see Bucky so guarded, so frightened, until he started to catch flashes of the real Bucky again. He’s so relieved, in fact, that he doesn’t stop to ask himself whether maybe Bucky knows this, too—whether maybe, on some level, he’s pushing himself _too_ hard to put on a brave face, to wisecrack, to make sure Steve thinks everything is fine.

He doesn’t ask himself yet, but he will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credits time!
> 
> First off, many thanks to [ThisThatAndTheOther](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisThatAndTheOther/pseuds/ThisThatAndTheOther) for the amazing idea. I hope you don't mind I went a little off-prompt... or that I accidentally wrote a novella.
> 
> Shout-outs to [RobynGoodfellow](http://archiveofourown.org/users/robyngoodfellow/pseuds/robyngoodfellow) for helpful haunting suggestions, many of which made it into the final draft; [Beradan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/beradan/pseuds/beradan) for not letting me get sidetracked onto the next project before this one was finished; and [Wrenlet](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Wrenlet/pseuds/Wrenlet) for letting me prattle about this fic for six weeks straight, and for loaning me Poe's _House of Leaves_ album, which inspired the title.
> 
> Banner image from [Ghost-Rebel-Stock](https://ghost-rebel-stock.deviantart.com/), original [here](https://ghost-rebel-stock.deviantart.com/art/Mansion-on-a-Hill-Stock-II-338334712).


	2. Chapter 2

Steve lies awake for a long time on the first night, listening for any sound from Bucky’s room across the hall, but there’s nothing, and in the morning Steve finds him up and in the kitchen, watching the elaborate coffee maker intently while it hisses and steams, heating up.

“Sleep well?” Steve asks, and when Bucky nods, he ventures, “Any idea what you’d like to do today?”

Bucky looks hesitant. “Read? In the library?”

Steve grins. Bucky _really_ likes that reading nook. “Go for it,” he says. “Will you be okay if I go grocery shopping? Sharon stocked up a few things when she came up to open the house for you—I see you found the coffee—but we’ll need more pretty fast.”

“Sharon is Peggy’s… granddaughter?” Bucky asks, screwing up his face in concentration.

“Niece.”

“So it should’ve been her house?”

“It’s _your_ house,” Steve says. “Sharon told me she would’ve had to sell it, and she’s happier seeing it stay in the family, in a sense.”

“Are you and her—”

“What, seeing each other? No,” Steve says, laughing faintly. “She’s great, but that would’ve been… no.”

“Then why’s she being so nice to me?”

“Because…” Steve hesitates. It won’t go over well if he says outright that she pities Bucky for what he’s been through, even if that’s the most honest answer. “Maybe she thinks you’re cute,” he says instead, and Bucky actually blushes. Steve grins. _That’s_ new. “Anything special you want from the store?”

“You probably know what I like better than I do,” Bucky says, looking down at his hands. “I’m never sure what I like until I try it.”

 _Jesus Christ,_ Steve thinks. Abstractly, he knew he was going to keep finding gaping holes in Bucky’s memory, but as somebody who remembers teenage Bucky’s appetite all too well, it brings it home all over again to realize they took away something as basic as _food._ “Not a problem,” he says, keeping his tone light. “See you in a couple hours, okay?” and Bucky nods and goes back to watching the coffee maker like it’s a bomb about to explode.

Steve waits until he’s out of sight of the house before he tells the car to dial his phone for him—something he still only half believes is a common feature in cars these days and not Tony somehow trolling him. He isn’t expecting an answer, but Sam picks up on the first ring. “You know you and my nana are literally the last two people on the planet who still _call_ me, right?” he says, and Steve grins.

“Hey, Sam.”

“Hey, man. How’s the place?”

“Good. Good.” Steve barely hesitates at all before adding, “The first night went really, I think.”

“But?”

“Does there have to be a but?”

“You’re phoning me instead of introducing Barnes to the joys of lattes and cable TV, so.”

Steve huffs, but Sam isn’t wrong. “It’s just,” he says, and then, in a rush, “Am I a terrible person if I expected it to be a lot harder than it is?”

Sam is quiet for a minute, which is one of the things Steve loves about him. First he listens to what you’re saying, then he listens to what you’re _not_ saying, then he thinks before he answers. “Recovery is different for everybody,” he says. “Some people, it starts out hard and gets easier. Sometimes it’s rocky all the way through. For other people, it’s like… You ever get hurt on a mission and not know it until you were back on base and somebody else pointed out that you were bleeding?”

“Maybe.”

“Yeah, I figured. Trauma can be like that, too. Sometimes it takes years before a person gets to where they can really process what happened. It can even make it worse because they thought they were doing fine for so long. A lot of the time, those folks beat themselves up for regressing when they should be proud that they’re finally getting strong enough to face their demons. Because some of those demons are pretty bad, man. If you’re looking for advice, then be glad Barnes is getting a break. But don’t be shocked if this turns out to be the calm before the storm.”

“Okay,” Steve says. It’s not exactly what he was hoping to hear, but it’s better to go into this prepared. “Thanks, Sam.”

“Thank me by finding your own therapist,” Sam says. “There’s only so much I can do.”

“You make it sound like what I really need is a priest,” Steve says, smiling.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “That might not be the worst idea, either.”

 

They make dinner together for the first time in seventy years.

Bucky quietly avoids anything involving knives, washing the vegetables but leaving Steve to do the chopping; he’s completely unbothered by the oven, even when Steve accidentally makes the gas burner flare, but he jumps a solid foot when Steve takes a carton of milk out of the fridge. Steve resolutely doesn’t act like anything is out of the ordinary, and eventually they sit down to the kind of meal they used to only get at Christmas. Bucky cuts tiny slivers off the food with the edge of his fork to taste before he commits to a mouthful of anything, but Steve has apparently remembered his likes and dislikes just fine, because there’s nothing he outright rejects. By the end of the meal, he’s even picked up his steak knife a time or two, which is a weird thing to feel triumphant about, but there it is.

“So is there anything you want to know?” Steve asks, keeping his voice casual, as he pushes his plate away.

Bucky raises his eyes, cautious but interested. “About before?”

“About before, about now, about anything. My life was always an open book to you, Buck. You knew me better than I knew myself. I’ll tell you anything you want.” Aware that he’s babbling, he stops, and Bucky looks thoughtful.

“How’d I meet you?” he asks.

Steve smiles, a little bittersweet. He must’ve told this story a thousand times, but he never thought he’d have to tell it to Bucky. “You were nine. I was eight, but I probably looked about six. I got in a fight in an alley on my way home from school. You showed up, saw it was three against one, and jumped in on my side.”

“Three kids on one?” Bucky’s eyes go wide. _“Assholes.”_

“That’s what’s funny,” Steve says. “It was years before I told you I started it.”

Bucky laughs, with a slightly shocked expression, as if he’s surprised that he still knows how. Then he does the blush again.

“Did we, uh, did we ever fuck?” he asks.

Steve drops his fork, and Bucky turns bright red. “I’m sorry! I didn’t—”

“No, it’s fine.” It’s not fine, but he committed to this, didn’t he? “We… didn’t go all the way, but I guess we thought it was okay to fool around as long as we were kids. Like it didn’t really count, because eventually we were gonna grow out of it or something. Then you got it into your head that I needed to find a girl to take care of me. That was around the time my ma got sick, although I didn’t put the two things together until later. Then the war started, and you had to go, and… You seemed happy enough about me and Peggy. Hell, you pushed us together every chance you got. Guess you figured you’d been responsible for me long enough,” he adds, tempering the words with a smile.

“That wasn’t why,” Bucky says. “I think I just knew she was better for you than me.”

Steve takes a deep breath, and then he takes a chance. He reaches across the table and puts his hand over Bucky’s—touching his right hand, so that Bucky can really feel it. “She _was_ good for me,” he says, “and I did love her. We would’ve been happy, if we’d gotten the chance. But that never meant I stopped loving you.”

Bucky looks down, but he lets Steve’s hand linger there for a moment, then quickly squeezes it before he lets go. “I was…”

“Yeah?”

“I wasn’t sure if I’d always liked guys,” Bucky says. “For a while, I was afraid maybe it was... something Hydra did to me. That they changed everything else about me, and if that was something they wanted, what would it mean if now _I_ wanted—”

 _“Bucky,”_ Steve says, appalled. “It’s not something wrong with you. Things have changed a lot since we were kids. There’s hard science on it now. It’s biology, not some kind of... moral failure.”

“I know.” Bucky’s smile looks more solid this time. “I’m just glad that part was real.”

 _Don’t ever doubt it,_ Steve wants to say. _And don’t you_ ever _be ashamed of who you are._ But he swallows it, and just says, “Me too.”

Bucky pulls his hand back, but it just feels like he’s giving himself some space, not like he’s retreating. “Steve,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Did I… make you go on a roller coaster and laugh when you threw up?”

Steve stares at him for a long moment, then starts laughing himself. Bucky looks confused, and briefly alarmed, as if he’s not sure whether he’s done something wrong—but then he laughs too, and they both keep right on laughing until there’s a crash from the hallway.

Bucky is up and moving even before Steve’s reflexes kick in. By the time Steve is out of his chair, he’s in the doorway, on full-body alert, shoulders wide and metal arm raised as if he expects to have to stop a bullet. Then he relaxes—slightly. He points, and Steve follows the line of his metal finger to a round wooden frame on the floor, then up to a hook high on the hallway wall. “Clock fell off the wall,” he says, sounding like he’s mostly trying to convince himself. “It’s too high, nobody could’ve bumped it.”

“Of course nobody did,” Steve says, ignoring the hammering of his own heart. “There’s no way anybody could’ve gotten into this house without one of us hearing.” He leans down and picks up what’s left of the clock; the glass front is cracked into three pieces, the smallest metal hand bent and clicking the same second over and over. “Sharon probably noticed it was stopped, took it down to wind it and didn’t quite get it back on the hook. We’ve been walking back and forth all day. We must have shaken it loose.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Has to be it.”

It’s a strange, jarring ending to what’s been a perfectly nice day, and Steve can see that Bucky is more rattled than he wants to admit. Still, it’s only the second night in the house, and they’re already settling in, making progress, talking about important things, real things. Surely it’s all going to be fine.

 

Bucky adamantly refuses to go near anyone calling themselves a doctor, therapist, or psychiatrist, but for some reason, he trusts Sam implicitly and completely. Steve doesn’t know if it’s because Sam blatantly refuses to be impressed by Bucky, treating him more like an annoying kid brother than a killing machine, or if it’s just one more thing that will probably never make sense outside of Bucky’s own head. But the fact is, even though Sam is almost certainly coming up with his advice by polling the same doctors Bucky avoids like the plague, the minute he passes it along, Bucky takes it as gospel truth. So when Sam tells him that he should try to establish a routine he can stick to for a while, Bucky takes it to heart and invents one overnight. Steve comes down the stairs one morning to find it all laid out on a neatly hand-printed list taped to the fridge:

 _0700 - wake up_  
_0800 - breakfast_  
_0830 - dishes_ _  
0900 - exercise_

...and so on up until the first one that surprises him: _1400 - leave the house._

“Where you gonna go at fourteen-hundred?” he asks, when Bucky comes up behind him.

Bucky shuffles his feet. “Just… out,” he says, and then, almost shyly, “Wanna go with me?”

“I might attract more of a crowd than you want,” Steve says, wry.

“That’s my plan,” Bucky says, with that little quirk of his mouth that isn’t quite a smile. “You’re my distraction.”

“Well, if it’s for the success of the mission,” Steve says, then stops abruptly, wondering if he’s put a foot wrong here, if the phrasing is too reminiscent of that horrible day on the helicarrier. But if it is, Bucky doesn’t show it, so at two o’clock, out they go.

In a happy coincidence, there’s a farmers’ market set up in the middle of town, close enough to walk to. Steve hesitates when he sees how many people there are—Bucky isn’t so good with crowds nowadays—but as it turns out, there are enough people that they can move around in reasonable anonymity, without being enough to put Bucky’s hackles up. In spite of the fact that he’s uncomfortably aware of being followed by more than one set of female eyes, Steve goes completely unrecognized. Maybe it’s the ball cap and sunglasses, or maybe it’s just that nobody expects to see Captain America at a small-town farmers’ market. Still, it’s Bucky who seems to slide right into the rhythm of the thing. Maybe it’s some kind of mission skill, or maybe the scruffy jacket and long hair give him some sort of gardener vibe, but Bucky seems… easy among these strangers, somehow. Content. He doesn’t even flinch when someone remarks on the jacket and gloves he’s wearing in spite of the early autumn sun; he just says, “Yeah, I got a thyroid thing, I’m always cold,” with an ease that suggests a well-practiced lie. Steve certainly never coached him on that one, the way he did with some of the other aspects of Bucky’s cover story.

There’s no part of Bucky’s life on the run that could have been easy. He wonders what it says about him if he’s a little sorry to have missed it.

When Bucky gets into a long discussion with a woman running a fruit stand, Steve leans up against the frame of a stall selling local honey and thinks, fleetingly, that he can’t remember the last time he had this kind of luxury: nothing to do, nowhere to be. Then he realizes: of course he does. When he was younger, almost every day involved school, church, or work if he was lucky or hustling for work if he wasn’t; the only times he didn’t have something to do were when he was too sick to be out of bed. And then, of course, there was the Army. Back then, free time would have sounded like the height of luxury. But then he woke up in what he still thinks of, sometimes, as Manhattan of the Future, and it was less a question of having nowhere to be than having no reason to be anywhere. Steve isn’t entirely lacking in self-awareness; he knows that it is, as Tony would say, _pretty messed up_ that he was so desperate for a purpose that an alien invasion felt like a blessing. But after that he was always on call either for the Avengers or S.H.I.E.L.D., and then he was looking for Bucky, and now… now that he’s found Bucky, it’s strangely hard to figure out how to stop.

“Could you not lean on the stand, honey?” a voice says behind him, and he quickly straightens his back and stammers, “I am so sorry,” to the middle-aged woman tending the stall, who looks deeply amused.

“Still can’t take your eyes off him, huh?” she says.

“Oh, uh. Oh. _Oh._ We’re not—I mean, we’re—” Steve rakes a hand through his hair. “Sorry. I’m Steve,” he says, hoping against hope that she won’t ask any follow-up questions. “We’re, uh…”

“It’s okay, honey. I know we’re a small town, but we’re not hicks. Most everybody’s perfectly thrilled to have a nice young gay couple living in the Carter house, and if anybody isn’t, you send them to me and I’ll smack them for you.” She holds out her hand. “Raina.”

“Raina. Thanks.” Steve shakes her hand automatically, still reeling a little.

“How long have you two been together?”

Steve opens his mouth to explain, then realizes there’s absolutely no way he can cover the truth. “We’ve known each other a long time, but I guess you’d say our being… together… is new. The house is his, really. I’m just a freeloader.”

“Can’t imagine how you’d make it up to him,” Raina says dryly, sweeping her eyes up and down his body. Steve feels himself blush. “Here,” she says, pressing a jar of honey into his hand. “No, don’t argue, I’ll be mortally offended if you don’t take it. Welcome to the neighborhood.”

“Thank you,” Steve says, resolving to come back in a few weeks and buy the place out.

Then he turns around, and Bucky is gone.

“Excuse me,” he says, and takes off through the crowd at the fastest walk that he doesn’t think will look suspicious. It’s not as if Bucky hasn’t been out of his sight before, but… He’s never been more grateful that he’s tall enough to scan over the crowd for the blue jacket and ball cap as he rounds a corner, palms sweating and mouth dry, a beat of _no, no, no,_ thumping through his head in time with his pounding heart.

And Bucky, the asshole, is sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of a booth that says _Fine Whines & Lickers Animal Rescue - Take Home Your New Best Friend Today!, _with a brown and white mutt curled up in his lap.

Steve takes a deep breath and forces his hunched shoulders back into something closer to their normal position. He walks across to Bucky, sits down beside him, and says, “So, I’m that easy to replace, huh?”

Bucky looks up, and Steve meets his wide blue eyes and reads his own doom written in the mix of apology, eagerness, and bloody-minded determination there. “Sam says some people think it’s really therapeutic to—”

“Bucky, it’s fine,” Steve says, with a laugh. “If you want to take a dog home based on the worst pun I’ve heard since 1923, I’m not gonna stop you. You’ll have to redo your whole itinerary, though. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather start with a plant or something?”

Bucky glowers at him. It might even look menacing if he wasn’t doing it over the head of a dog that’s licking his stubbled chin. Steve laughs. “He got a name?”

“She,” Bucky says. “And they said it was Lula, but I think I got a better one.”

Fifteen minutes later, Bucky has shelled out the adoption fee—the ponytailed shelter worker keeps promising not to deposit the check until their two-week trial is over, but it’s plain to Steve that the dog will be leaving over Bucky’s dead body, and probably a few others besides—and filled in the name _Brooklyn Dodger Barnes_ on the registration slip. “I see how it is,” Steve says, when the dog hedges at jumping up into the front seat of the car and Bucky slides into the back seat to sit with her instead. “It only takes two hundred and fifty bucks to buy yourself a better friend than the one you’ve known since 1918.”

“Fuck you, Steve,” Bucky says amiably. “We mighta both been supposed to die like six times and found each other again after seventy years, but me and Dodger? That’s destiny.”

 

Dodger slides into the rhythm of the household as if she’s always been there. Okay, she eats some throw pillows and pisses on the floor a few times before she figures it out, but Bucky just has to look at her disappointedly and she goes into agonies of remorse. “Learned that fuckin’ trick from you,” Bucky tells Steve, smugly. Soon enough she’s curling up at his feet while he reads in the window seat and sleeping on his bed at night, and after all his joking about being replaced, Steve actually catches himself feeling jealous before he reminds himself, firmly, that it isn’t personal; Bucky has good reason to keep his distance from other humans, and maybe from Steve most of all, given that he did shoot Steve in the gut and crack his cheekbone with the hand that isn’t metal. He focuses his attention on winning over Dodger instead, until she gets to the point where she’ll let him take her out on the leash and out of sight of Bucky—even if it’s only occasionally and reluctantly.

Filling up the rest of his day is harder. Bucky turns one of their afternoon outings into a trip to an art supply store at a neighboring town, and over Steve’s protests, an obscene amount of the stipend Peggy left him for running the house gets converted into paints and pastels and something called _Prismacolor markers_ that Bucky has read about on the internet; but it’s hard for Steve’s fingers to hold a pencil and not immediately start in on a scene that might be triggering to Bucky, so he abandons most of them before they’re fairly started. He putters around the house looking for things to repair—he used to take care of things a lot for his ma when their scumbag building super failed to fix the busted radiator or plug the leaks around the windows, and that was good work, satisfying in a different way from his art—but even after being closed up for a couple of years, the house is in shockingly good trim. He goes running again instead, and cooks increasingly ludicrous meals, and has trouble sleeping, and reads the same paragraphs in the _Times_ over and over without ever registering, say, where Wakanda is or why it’s such big news that its king is attending some summit of world leaders. But he doesn’t think Bucky has noticed, which is why it comes as such a shock when he wakes up one morning to an unholy racket in the yard and stumbles outside to see Bucky leaning against the porch rail, arms crossed, while two guys muscle a rusted-out car off a flatbed and onto the slab beside the driveway.

“What the hell is that?” he says.

Bucky turns and looks at him. “1941 DeSoto,” he says, like Steve is a complete idiot.

“I know it’s a— _why_ is there a 1941 DeSoto in our driveway? We have a car, you know.”

“Yeah, a car I fuckin’ hate and I’m never gonna drive it.”

“You never said—”

“I said, ‘I fuckin’ hate this fuckin’ car,’ Steve.”

Come to think of it, Bucky might have said something along those lines, yeah. “I thought you just meant you hated being in cars at all.”

“Modern ones, yeah. All fuckin’ sensors and computer chips. You know they got guys who can hack into the navigation and run ’em off the road if they want to? I’m sure as hell not driving anything made after 1952.”

“So you couldn’t buy one that isn’t…” Steve stares at the car, then turns away, half afraid that looking at it too hard might make the bumper fall off. “That?”

“I’m gonna fix it up when I get around to it.”

Steve narrows his eyes. “Really.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Because I’m pretty sure every time you’ve ever said you were going to get around to something, I was the one who eventually got around to it.”

“Not my fault you’re a fuckin’ anal-retentive.”

“They call it Type A now, thank you very much,” Steve says, and watches the corner of Bucky’s mouth twitch. “You think you have to make busy work for me?”

“Isn’t that what sergeants are for?” Bucky says, and Steve’s mouth falls open before he catches himself. It’s the first time Bucky has mentioned his old rank since—well, since 1944. “Yeah, leave it right there,” he calls to one of the guys, who walks over to hand him the title and the keys. “Thanks.”

“The HOA’s gonna be all over us,” says Steve.

“Aw, poor little super-soldier’s intimidated by the little old ladies’ garden club.”

“Yes, I am. Have you _met_ Mrs. Ashton?” Steve says, but Bucky just tosses the keys in the air, catches them in his gloved hand, and heads toward the house. “Hey,” Steve calls after him, “I know what you’re doing,” but Bucky is grinning too widely to answer.

 

So that’s where they stand—house, car, dog, to all appearances on their way to a nice little white-picket-fence kind of life—when Tony comes to visit.

He drives up with Pepper one Sunday, in some screamingly fast orange sports car Steve can’t identify, and swaggers up the porch steps carrying a bottle of wine with a red, white, and blue ribbon around the neck. “Housewarming gift,” he says, when he presents it to Bucky, who takes it awkwardly; he’s met Tony, sort of, in passing, but they haven’t really spoken. Or rather, Tony’s the one who did all the speaking, swinging wildly from neurology to engineering to guesses about what kind of alloy might have been used to craft Bucky’s metal arm, while Bucky sat behind Steve, looking down at his clasped hands in silence.

As subtly as he can manage, given that he’s six-foot-two and two hundred pounds of muscle at last count, Steve plants himself between the two of them. “Thank you, Tony,” he says, slinging a friendly arm around him and trying to signal through every inch of body language that Tony’s not a threat. “But actually, we should’ve thought to ask you if you wanted anything from Peggy’s cellar. You know, she’s got a stash down there, and anything nice is wasted on the two of us, considering that neither of us can get drunk and we both cut our teeth on Prohibition rotgut.”

“Now that’s a story the American people deserve to hear,” Tony says, and looks disappointed when Steve doesn’t volunteer anything further. “Aunt Peggy’s collection is still down there, huh? Should’ve figured—she wasn’t much of a drinker, but she had expensive tastes.”

“You knew her?” Bucky asks, and Steve takes heart; he still sounds rattled, but with Bucky, any conversation is better than silence.

“Of course. She and my dad worked together for something like forty years,” Tony says. “They weren’t as close as they had been, had some kind of falling-out in the Seventies, but she didn’t just drop out of his life. I didn’t see her much after he died, and she sure as hell didn’t like the direction Stane and I took the company in after that—in retrospect, she had a point there—but she always sent a card and a gift basket full of distressingly British sausages at Christmas, that kind of thing.”

“Sounds like Peggy,” Steve agrees. “So you’ve been to the house before?”

“Decades ago. One of her famous V-Day parties, I think. She never quit throwing them. I’m reasonably sure I got drunk and tried to fall in the Hudson.”

“Well, I haven’t,” Pepper says smoothly, standing up. “Bucky, do you suppose I could trouble you for a tour? I hear the library is fantastic.”

Steve is about to jump in and volunteer, but Bucky looks so relieved at the excuse to get out of range of Tony that he bites his tongue, and then Tony takes it a step further by saying, “Sure, while they do that, you can tell me what the deal is with that offensively ancient bucket of bolts.”

“You mean the car?” Steve says, raising an eyebrow, while Bucky ushers Pepper through the doorway.

“No, I mean your boyfriend. Of course I mean the car, Rogers, and if you didn’t think I was going to be personally offended that you’re doing a restoration without even consulting me—” Tony stops. Steve can feel his cheeks getting hot, and of course Tony’s noticed. “What,” he says, “don’t tell me that you—are you serious, Rogers? So that whole ‘best friends since childhood’ thing, that was actually—oh my _God._ ”

“You need to know that we’re not... together right now, Tony,” Steve says, sliding a finger under the collar of his shirt, which suddenly feels too tight. “Everything Bucky’s going through, we’re… neither of us is sure where this is headed.”

“Who cares where it’s headed, I want to know where it’s _been,”_ Tony says, grinning wolfishly. “Because I’m not kidding, Spangles, it changes my entire _life_ if you’re telling me that the paragon of virginal American manhood my dad said I could never hope to live up to actually spent the prewar years playing hide-the-salami with his secret boyfriend.”

“I’m pretty sure we never did that,” Steve says, face burning. “Tony, please don’t ask Bucky any questions about this. There’s so much he’s dealing with right now. He doesn’t have any idea what he wants, and after everything Hydra did to him, the last thing I want to do is pressure him into anything.”

Tony’s glee visibly drains from his face. “Buddy,” he says, putting a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “I know a little about going through stuff that makes you question yourself, you know.”

“I know, Tony.”

“If he needs to talk…” It’s as close as he’s ever seen Tony to struggling for words. “Well, if he needs to talk, then he should go to a qualified therapist, God knows I’m too much of a hot mess to sort out anybody else’s issues. But if Super-BFF needs anything, anything at all... Send me the bill. It’s the least I can do.”

“Thank you, Tony,” Steve says, meaning it.

“Now,” Tony says, showing more mercy than Steve would have expected, “let’s return to the subject of your choice in front-yard decorative vehicles.”

 

Bucky barely says two words when he and Pepper rejoin the party, but as usual, Tony has enough to say for all of them—at least, until Pepper lays a hand on his arm and says, “Tony, we need to get back, we have that thing,” and Tony _almost_ makes a smooth transition from having no idea what she’s talking about to catching on as he agrees, “Yeah, the thing, we gotta make it to the thing.” Somehow Pepper manages to make it a graceful exit in spite of him, and Steve leans out the front door and waves after them as the orange car zips away. It’s probably a good thing they’re taking off: while they’ve been in the house, thick dark clouds have rolled in from the east, and the wind is starting to kick up, bringing with it a smell of rain. “I don’t love how fast Tony drives, but I sure hope they beat the storm back to the city,” Steve begins, turning to Bucky, only to discover that Bucky is no longer beside him; at some point he’s vanished as silently as a ghost.

Steve finds him in the reading nook, of course. In Sam’s parlance, this is Bucky’s _safe place,_ the spot he always runs to when he’s on edge. Still, Steve is unsettled by just how vulnerable he looks with his head down, half his face covered by his hair and the other half buried in Dodger’s fur while he hugs her to his chest. Dodger shoots Steve a look that reads, _I am loyal and devoted but also profoundly uncomfortable right now,_ and he thinks, _Well, kiddo, that makes two of us._ He raps his knuckles against the library doorframe and says, “Can I come in?”

The noise Bucky makes isn’t a yes, but it isn’t a no, either, so Steve crosses the room and carefully settles himself on the window seat, squeezing himself into the space beside Bucky’s drawn-up feet. “I’m sorry about Tony,” he begins. “I shouldn’t have told him he could come so soon. He means well, but he can be kind of a lot to deal with.”

Bucky doesn’t answer for long enough that Steve is drawing breath to try again when he finally mumbles, “He wasn’t the problem.”

“Okay. Wanna tell me what was?”

“Howard,” Bucky says, his voice very low. “And… Maria.”

“Oh, Buck…” Steve swallows hard, trying to think. It’s not that he’d forgotten about that, exactly, but it wasn’t at the forefront of his mind. He’s never been sure how well Bucky remembers individual incidents from the Winter Soldier days; it’s not the kind of thing he feels like he can really ask about, because what if he makes it worse by stirring it up? It hasn’t occurred to him until now that maybe the opposite would be the case.

“They tried not to let me find out their names, when they sent me on kill missions,” Bucky says, still low. Dodger squirms, and he loosens his arms to let her jump down, but the minute she does, he tucks them back around himself. “Only photos of the... targets. There was no file on her like they had on him. I wanted to think she wasn’t supposed to be there, but that’s not why. It’s just because they don’t care about collateral damage.”

“Didn’t care,” Steve corrects, as gently as he can. “They’re gone, Buck. They can’t hurt you anymore.”

“Howard knew me,” Bucky says. “I didn’t… When things started coming back to me, I didn’t even remember that I’d met him before, when we worked for the SSR. Thought I’d made that part up after I saw him in the newsreels or something. I didn’t remember that he knew me until Tony was talking about when he died, and then it came back to me. He said, ‘Sergeant Barnes?’ Just like that, like a question. And then I killed him.”

“You didn’t have anything to do with it, Buck,” Steve says. “You were just the gun. Somebody else pulled the trigger.”

“Only I’m not, though,” Bucky says, and something in his tone is shifting; it’s a little more dangerous, now, a little less like the shy but hopeful Bucky he’s been seeing for the last few weeks and more like— _no,_ he tells himself, but his brain supplies it anyway—more like the Asset. “I was thinking. I was making choices. They told me who the target was, but they let me decide how to make the kill. You tell a dog to bite somebody and the dog does it, that doesn’t mean the dog isn’t a biter.”

“You never decided to kill for them, Bucky. I’ve seen the files. They tortured you if you didn’t follow orders. They did their damnedest to destroy every part of you that could have resisted.”

“I should’ve been able to hold out longer, though. I should’ve fought harder. I should’ve—”

“Bucky, I’m begging you, please don’t do this.”

“—I should’ve let them kill me before I did what they wanted,” Bucky says.

“You _already had,_ Buck,” Steve shouts, suddenly livid—not at Bucky, but at Hydra, and not as much over what they did as over the fact that they’re still doing it. When is everything the two of them do, everything the two of them _are,_ going to get free of the specter of goddamned Hydra everywhere they turn? “You went off to a war you didn’t want anything to do with, you did everything they asked of you and more, and then you made the ultimate sacrifice. It was a crazy accident that you didn’t die, not that I’m not grateful, but you deserved to be honored for giving everything in the line of duty. And instead of letting you rest, they kept bringing you back just to kill you all over again every time they put you in that goddamned chair.”

“Steve—”

“You deserved to go to heaven,” Steve says, hearing the hardness in his voice and hating it. “And instead you were in hell. How long are you gonna keep blaming yourself for that? When are you gonna realize—”

“You’re the one who doesn’t _realize,_ Steve.”

Steve looks up at the change in Bucky’s tone and immediately wishes he hadn’t. Bucky’s eyes are squinched shut; his metal hand is clenched so tight that Steve is half afraid it’s going to break. “The things I did,” he says, “they weren’t my fault. I know they weren’t. In my head, I get that, okay? But what you don’t get is that _I still did them._ I remember all of them. And this deal you set up, this plea bargain you signed without asking me what I wanted, it says I’m not allowed to take responsibility for any of that, which means I can’t even tell their kids that I’m fucking sorry!”

Steve is dumbstruck. “Bucky, I had to sign it,” he says. “They were mobilizing a SWAT team until the second I picked up that pen. They were going to _kill_ you. I didn’t have a choice.”

“No choice?” Bucky says, and Steve knows that his voice is close to breaking. “Who had a gun to your head, Steve? Oh, yeah, that’s right, I did.”

Steve clenches his jaw. “I don’t know what you want from me, Buck. I’m not going to tell you I’m sorry for saving your life. I know it wasn’t perfect, but if you’d died, I would’ve died too. I’m sorry, I’ve been trying not to unload that on you, but that’s how it is, and I can’t believe we’re fighting over the fact that I didn’t want you dead!”

“Which makes you,” Bucky yells back, “one more person who didn’t ask me what I wanted!”

Steve is reeling back from him in horror when a massive clap of thunder rattles the house to its foundations. The bay window blows open, and Bucky yelps as the hinged double frames swing inward, banging off the inside wall so hard that two of the glass panes shatter. Steve jumps up, grabs the one on the left, and shoves it back into position, but the sky has already opened up and the rain is battering the east side of the house, blowing straight in through the opening. “Get the other side,” he orders, and Bucky, who’s flattened himself against the wall, finally comes out of his daze enough to swing the other window back into position so that Steve can hold them both closed. “Latch is busted,” he shouts over the rattling noise, as the wind tries to push them right back open again. “We need something to hold this shut.”

Bucky runs to look for something, and Steve flattens his hands against the frame and looks out into the dark garden, watching the wind lash the branches. Tonight will definitely be the end of this year’s roses. They’ll be lucky, he thinks, if they don’t lose any branches from the oak tree in the back; maybe he should look into having it trimmed. As long as he keeps his mind on the house, on taking care of the things he can control, he’ll be okay. Then Bucky is back, carrying a two-by-four from the basement, which he wedges between the sill and the sash. Steve lets go, and the panels rattle wildly but don’t spring open again. The two of them stand there for a moment, both rain-soaked and panting and staring at each other, and then Bucky wordlessly turns and flees.

“Bucky,” Steve calls, moving after him, but he hears Bucky’s bedroom door slam before he even reaches the foot of the stairs. Burning with shame, he goes and gets some towels instead, so he can mop up the water and cover the shattered panes to keep more rain from pouring in. He’s working on that when he becomes aware of a low sound behind him.

Dodger stands in the doorway, paws planted wide, hackles raised. Her lips are drawn back from her canines in a snarl, and she’s growling from somewhere deep in her chest. She’s not looking at him, though; she’s looking at a point behind him, maybe two feet over his left shoulder. Steve turns and looks, and of course there’s nothing there, but her eyes remain fixed on the same spot, never moving even when he does.

“Hey,” he says, “it’s okay, girl, there’s noth—” but then, without warning, she turns tail and takes off up the stairs.

It’s a good thing nobody is there to see Steve, because it means he doesn’t have to pretend to be anything but completely unnerved by this. He finishes the job, because he has to, and then he sits on the couch and stares at nothing for a very long time.

 

He doesn’t fall asleep until the worst of the storm passes, and he has bad dreams when he does, the confusing half-remembered kind that leave a deep sense of uneasiness in their wake. Of course, he doesn’t have much time to dwell on them, because he’s woken up by Dodger whimpering and pacing just outside his bedroom door, claws clicking nervously on the hardwood. Bucky’s bedroom door is still shut. He stumbles down the steps as Dodger’s whining increases in urgency, opens the back door, and stands on the porch while she pees in the sodden back yard for a good ten seconds before bolting back inside, out of the rain that’s still coming down. It’s only then that he thinks to check the time and realizes it’s almost eleven, four hours past the start of the schedule taped to the fridge. He can’t let it go any longer; he goes upstairs and raps on Bucky’s door, says, “Buck? You awake?”, and when there’s no answer, lets himself in.

Bucky is still curled up under the covers, and he only groans when Dodger hops up onto the bed and noses at him. “Steve? I don’t feel so great,” he mumbles. “Could you take Dodger out?”

“Already done.” Steve hovers in the doorway, uncertain, then thinks, _Hell with it,_ and goes in to take a seat on Bucky’s bed. “You don’t sound great, either. You coming down with something?”

“Maybe? Doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen. Shitty knockoff super-serum.”

Bucky is clearly trying to make it a joke, but he does sound hoarse and stuffy, although that could be… well, if he has been crying, Steve isn’t going to out him. “Well,” he says, in the same tone, “guess I shouldn’t have let you go to bed with wet hair, stupid.”

“Jeez, Steve, even your mom knew that was an old wives’ tale, and that was a hundred years ago. Don’t go blaming yourself for this too.” He hesitates, then says, “We gotta talk about last night.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Steve says. “I was being a jackass. Case closed.”

“We do, though.” Bucky reaches out from under the blankets to grab his hand. He squeezes a little too hard with the metal fingers, but Steve doesn’t pull away. “I didn’t mean it.”

“I know.”

“I wouldn’t rather be dead.”

“I know.”

“I just felt like shit and I was an asshole to you and I’m sorry.”

“It was my fault, Bucky. I should have talked it through with you instead of letting Tony rush me into signing those damn Accords.”

“Stop trying to make out like I’m some kind of saint just because I’ve been through some bad shit, Steve,” Bucky says, with surprising firmness. “You gotta let me be a real person, and that means calling me on it when I fuck up.”

“Fine, you’re an idiot,” Steve agrees. It wrings a broken laugh out of Bucky, anyway, so that’s something. “But you’re _my_ idiot, so why don’t you just stay in bed today and let me take care of you?”

Bucky takes his hand back to rub his eyes. “S’posed to be on a routine.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re allowed to take one day off.” He’s already decided not to say anything about Dodger’s weird behavior in the library—it was obviously just some kind of doggy brain malfunction; a few weeks with Dodger is plenty to convince him that dogs have those—but he kind of wants to keep Bucky out of there until the damage isn’t quite so plainly visible. “You get some rest. I’m going to see what I can do about that window, and after that I’ll bring you some lunch, okay?”

“You always try to do too much,” Bucky says.

“I’m Captain America. It comes with the territory.” He reaches out, pauses, and when Bucky doesn’t flinch, smooths his hair back from his face. Then he frowns. There’s a thin red line on Bucky’s cheekbone, no more than half an inch long but crusted over with dried blood. “Where’d that cut come from?”

Bucky reaches up and touches it, wincing. “Must’ve been the broken glass,” he says, with a frown. “It’s not too bad. It’ll probably heal over by tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “I’m sure it’ll be just fine.”


	3. Chapter 3

_ Always name your fear, Steven, _ Steve’s mother’s voice says in his head.  _ Tell the truth and shame the devil.  _

“I’m worried about Bucky,” Steve murmurs to his reflection in the mirror.

Eighty years on, and he can almost hear Sarah Rogers’ Irish brogue in his ear like it’s 1927 and she’s chiding him for getting in a fistfight with yet another bully down on Furman Street:  _ Sure and that’s the truth, but it’s not the  _ whole  _ truth, boyo, and both of us know it.  _

Steve takes a deep breath and says, “There’s something wrong in this house.”

It’s getting harder and harder to deny it. At first it was just little things, simple things,  _ deniable _ things. The house keys, for example: they never seem to stay where Bucky puts them. Every time it happens, he grumbles extensively about his faulty memory, searching his pockets for the keyring that turns up on the counter or under a stack of mail or once, memorably, half-hidden under the refrigerator. But Steve has been paying attention lately, and he’s seen that Bucky is embarrassed enough about it that he’s made a real effort to hang his key ring on the hook by the door every time he goes in or out. And still, somehow, the keys never seem to be there when Bucky wants them.

If that was the only thing he’d noticed, then of course he would have written it off as his own paranoia. But the thing with the books? There’s no way that was a coincidence.

It started when Steve walked into the library to find Bucky in his customary spot on the window seat, wearing a sweater, a scarf, and a knitted glove on his right hand, looking for all the world like an orphan from a Charles Dickens novel. “You know, if you’re that cold, you’re allowed to turn the heat up,” he’d said, taking a seat on the couch and reaching for the  _ 1941-1948 DeSoto Shop Manual  _ on the table.

“Heat costs money, and money doesn’t grow on trees,” Bucky said, without looking up from his book.

Steve grinned, wondering if Bucky had any idea how  _ exactly  _ like George Barnes circa 1933 he sounded in that moment. “You can take the boy out of the Depression,” he started to say, before he realized that maybe he didn’t want to make that particular joke. 

“Anyway, some of us don’t feel this driving need to run around in a T-shirt that’s two sizes too small,” Bucky shot back, unruffled. “You do realize that’s not how normal people dress in the future, right?”

“If you want to look like a hipster, that’s fine,” Steve said, “but seriously, it’s not that cold in here. Maybe we really should get your thyroid checked.” He was mostly joking, but not all: Bucky’s continued refusal to see a doctor—even Helen Cho, who’s one of the least threatening people on the planet—has been weighing on Steve’s mind.

“Yeah, sure, like you’d even notice how cold it is. Ever since you got the serum, you’re like a goddamn furnace.” Bucky eyed him for a moment, long enough for Steve to get wary. Then he got up, walked over to the couch, and slowly and deliberately flopped down on top of Steve.

Steve made a sound that definitely wasn’t  _ “Yipe,” _ as Bucky landed directly on his pelvis. The book went flying, and the next few minutes were a scramble of limbs as Steve tried to push Bucky away and Bucky went soft and boneless, turning himself into a dead weight that pinned one of Steve’s arms and both of his legs more effectively than any wrestling hold. The more Steve struggled and yelled, the wider Bucky’s grin got, and Steve realized abruptly: he’d forgotten that Bucky used to be  _ playful. _ “Get off me, you lunatic,” he cried, trying to pretend he wasn’t already laughing.

“ ‘Come on, Buck,’ ” Bucky whimpered, in a high, wavering voice, “ ‘it’s  _ cold,  _ just let me stay long enough to get warm, you don’t want me to get sick again, do you?’ ” and Steve’s free hand froze in place on Bucky’s shoulder when he realized that was supposed to be an impression of  _ him. _

“You remember that?” he said.

“Well, you pulled that shit often enough, didn’t you? Every time you stayed over, we’d make you this nice little bed on the floor with the couch cushions, and every time, you’d wait until the exact second I was too tired to fight you and then you’d crawl in bed with me—”

“Only when it  _ was  _ cold, and we both got twice the blankets that way. You should have been thanking me.”

“Yeah, it was great until  _ you  _ fell asleep, and  _ I _ had to lie there all night horny as hell with you all squashed up against me, and I couldn’t even do anything about it because my parents were in the next room over.”

Steve stared at him, processing this new information. Fortunately, his mouth hasn’t lost its old habit of disengaging from his brain. “Why didn’t you say something, if it was that much of a trial?”

“Because,” Bucky said, “if I had, you might’ve stopped,” and then, without warning, his mouth was on Steve’s.

It wasn’t a long kiss, in the scheme of things: long enough for Bucky to slip his tongue a fraction of an inch between Steve’s parted lips, long enough for Steve to let his eyes slide shut and breathe in the faint scent of Bucky’s skin, which, in spite of the serum and everything else, hasn’t really changed in seventy years. Then Bucky pulled back just a little, letting out a faint breath that might almost be a sigh, and pressed his forehead against Steve’s. “Can I ask you something?” 

“No, that was not my first kiss since 1945,” Steve said sharply. “Why do people keep thinking that?”

Bucky looked briefly taken aback, and then he laughed, the bastard. “Okay, not what I was gonna ask, but now I gotta know. How many?”

“Three, counting you,” Steve said, and was completely unprepared for Bucky’s snicker. He was honestly expecting Bucky to be impressed, considering that he’s basically doubled his prewar total. “Peggy, obviously, and then Natasha—”

“Bullshit, Rogers, the Black Widow did not let you kiss her.”

“I’ll have you know she kissed me, and you can ask her.”

“It was some kind of undercover thing, wasn’t it? Bet you two were posing as a couple and she was trying to sell the cover story.”

Steve made a grumbling noise and shifted his weight, which had the opposite effect than he intended, since it ended up with Bucky’s ass even more firmly planted in his lap. “Fine, what were you gonna ask me if that wasn’t it?”

“I wanted to know if, um…” Bucky always had this trick where he never lowered his eyes when he was embarrassed; he looked up instead, over Steve’s head. He was doing it again now. “Look, I haven’t really gone out with anyone since 1943,” he said. “And the last people we were both with weren’t each other.”

“That’s right. You were seeing that awful Lorraine woman, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. Until she got too handsy.” When Steve raised an eyebrow, Bucky did the blush again. “I know, I know, I used to like that. It was just… after Azzano, it was harder to get in the mood, you know? It’s been a long fucking time, is what I’m saying.”

“Okay,” Steve said. “So what’s the question?”

“I guess I was wondering if we could try… dating?”

“Dating?” 

“I know, I know, it sounds dumb,” Bucky said, in a rush. “We should be past that, right? I mean, I know everybody in town thinks we’re already married, we practically  _ are  _ married, I’m not gonna insult you by asking if you  _ like  _ me at this point, but the thing is, it’s—”

“It’s been a long time and you want to take it slow,” Steve supplied. “Of course, Buck. Anything you need.”

“It’s not just that,” Bucky said, and there went his eyes toward the ceiling again. “There was some other stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” 

“Stuff they did to me at Hydra. They… Well, usually nobody touched me at all unless they had to. Just ordered me around, you know? Most of them were afraid to get close to me, and I gave ’em good reason. But there were one or two of the handlers who got off on the fact that I wasn’t allowed to fight back. I think I fought anyway, a couple times, when I’d been out of cryo for a while and it was easier to get around the conditioning. I might’ve even killed one of them, I’m not sure. But every time I quit taking orders, or hurt one of them, they just wiped me and started over, and then they knew I’d be… obedient… for a while.” Bucky stopped. “Steve?”

Steve had no idea what kind of expression was on his face, because he was busy reeling. “I… I had no idea,” he stammered. “Bucky...”

“It’s okay. I mean,” Bucky amended, “it’s not okay that it happened, but it was a long time ago. I survived, right? And I’m sorry I dumped all that on you. It’s just, if we’re gonna try this—assuming you still want to try this—I thought you should know there’s some stuff I might get hung up on.”

“Jesus, Buck, this is not a situation where you need to apologize.” Steve had no idea what the situation  _ did  _ call for, honestly. “And of course I still want—this. You. Us.”

“Oh, thank fuck,” Bucky said, settling his head on Steve’s shoulder. “I mean, I knew you would, but there’s a difference between knowing it in your head and knowing it in your gut, you know?” 

It was probably a good thing he wasn’t looking at Steve’s face anymore when he said so, because the last thing Steve wanted was to let Bucky think the anger lancing through him was directed at  _ him.  _ Every time he’s thought he’d gotten to the bottom of the list, that Hydra couldn’t have come up with anything worse to do to Bucky, along came a fresh horror. The worst part was knowing there was nothing he could do; it was all so long ago that there was nobody left he could punch, and even if he could, it wouldn’t do anything to make this right. He pulled Bucky into a hug instead, sliding his hand down Bucky’s back to the line where the metal makes a seam with the flesh, and bent his head down, lifting Bucky’s chin and locking his mouth onto Bucky’s.

That was when the book fell off the shelf across the room.

Steve started at the  _ thump  _ when the heavy hardback hit the floorboards, but Bucky was off his lap and behind the couch before Steve even processed what was happening. “What the fuck,” he said, lowering his metal arm to his side once he decided there was no immediate threat. “Stevie, you know what this means, right?”

Steve shook his head. Something was starting to occur to him, yeah, but frankly, he wasn’t sure he  _ wanted  _ to know. “What?”

“We got rats, Stevie.”

Steve blinked. That wasn’t on the list of things he was expecting to hear. “What?”

“Has to be,” Bucky said, glaring at the book on the floor as if it was personally to blame. “Take something pretty big to push a book that size off the shelf. And it  _ was  _ pushed, I mean, look.” He pointed at the row of book spines, all perfectly in alignment except for one empty space. “It didn’t just fall out like that on its own.”

“No, it didn’t,” Steve agreed, wary. 

“So, rats,” Bucky said. “Which, now I think about it, I should’ve realized before. You’ve been hearing that noise in the walls at night, right?”

“What noise?”

“You know. Sounds like voices, but you can’t quite make ’em out? Honestly, as much as it pisses me off to think the little bastards think they can walk right in here, as if Dodger wouldn’t kill ’em the second she got hold of ’em—”

“Are we talking about the same dog who runs away from her squeaky toys when they startle her?” Steve said, mostly to cover the fact that he wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or alarmed. 

“Fuck you, Steve, she could hunt if she wanted to,” Bucky said, a statement that was, as far as Steve could tell, not rooted in any facts at all. “Tell you the truth, this is kind of a relief. Thought I was just hearing things the first couple times.”

“You didn’t say anything,” Steve said, his voice sounding weak in his own ears.

Yeah, ’cause if I did, then I definitely couldn’t get you off my ass about going to a doctor, which, no  _ thanks,  _ Rogers. But if it’s rats, we can handle it. I mean, it’s not the first time we’ve had to deal with that shit, is it? Remember that shitty apartment on—which one was it, York Street?”

“Plymouth,” Steve said. Ordinarily, Bucky casually dropping a memory like that was cause for celebration, at least inside his own head; now, he was just trying to distract himself from the sinking feeling in his stomach. “York Street just had cockroaches. Plymouth Street was the one with the rats.”

“Right. I’ll go to the hardware store tomorrow and get some traps,” Bucky said. And he did; he put traps under the sink, in the closets, the attic, the basement, pretty much anywhere Dodger couldn’t stick her nose in them by accident. He didn’t bother with the nice, gentle Hav-a-Hart kind, either; he bought the old kind with the metal springs, the ones designed to break a rat’s neck. “I said I wouldn’t hurt _people_ anymore,” he said, when Steve raised an eyebrow at the bags he dumped on the kitchen table, “but rats carry the fuckin’ plague, Rogers,” and while Steve was pretty sure science has disproven that, he didn’t say anything to the contrary—not then.

But he did keep an eye on the traps, and while a few of them around the house have sprung since then, there’s never a rat in them, and nothing has taken the bait.

After that, he started noticing other things.

The keys that don’t stay where Bucky put them, of course.

The half-dozen plums Bucky bought from the farmers’ market, the ones that he left out to ripen in a bowl on the kitchen counter, only to throw them out in disgust the next morning when he found them already spoiled, oozing rancid juice and crawling with fruit flies.

The way the radio in the living room keeps turning on by itself, and no matter how many times Steve sets it to NPR, no matter how many times Bucky swears he hasn’t touched it, it always seems to bump itself down to the “Classics of the 1940s” station.

The time he heard scratching at the back door and got up to let Dodger in from the yard, only to have her trot up behind him.

Little things. Deniable things.

Things that he’s becoming increasingly convinced are part of a pattern that’s all too real.

Now, he braces his hands against the sink, looks his reflection in the eye again, and says, “Come on, Rogers, you punched out Adolf Hitler over two hundred times. You can make a goddamn phone call.”

He’s not entirely convinced, but he picks up the phone, dials, and barely waits for a  _ hello  _ before he blurts, “What would you do if you were living in a house that might be haunted?”


	4. Chapter 4

Steve has a long list of reasons he’ll be grateful to Natasha Romanoff until the day he dies, but the fact that she doesn’t immediately laugh and/or hang up the phone is currently at the top of them. Her voice remains perfectly steady as she asks, “What makes you think that?”, and after he tells her—it’s a little garbled, but he’s fairly impressed that he does manage to lay out his case without making himself sound too much like a crazy person—she says, “Well, that is interesting.”

“You’re gonna tell me it’s rats, aren’t you,” Steve says glumly.

“No, I think you have a reasonable concern,” she says, and Steve blinks.

“What?”

“Did you know that forty-two percent of Americans believe in ghosts?” Natasha asks.

“Did you know that twenty-three percent of Americans believe the Chitauri invasion was a hoax and the whole thing was really a government cover-up for something?” Steve retorts, and he swears he can almost _hear_ Natasha grinning.

“Rogers, you’re the most naturally argumentative person I’ve ever met. I’m telling you I believe you, and you’re telling me why I’m wrong. Are you sure you’re not Russian?”

“Pretty sure,” Steve says dryly. “Do _you_ believe in ghosts?”

“To quote the inimitable Neil Gaiman, ‘What you’re really asking me is, do I believe in weird shit? And the answer is yes, of course I do,’ ” Natasha says. When Steve is silent for a moment, confused, she says, “Put him on your list. G-A-I—”

“Natasha, I need us to stay on task here.”

“Fair enough. Do you want me to talk to my guy?”

“You have a…” Here’s a thing Steve never expected to say out loud: “You have a ‘weird shit’ guy?”

“Of course I do.”

“Of course you do.”

“You’ll hate him,” Natasha says cheerfully. “But he’ll get the job done. I’ll tell him to call you. You can explain it to Barnes, though. I have a feeling that’s a conversation neither of you will enjoy. Oh, and leave your ringer turned on. My guy tends to forget that there’s such a thing as time zones. Or linear time in general.”

Steve hangs up the phone without a lot of confidence in the weird shit guy, but he tells himself that at least Natasha didn’t laugh at him, so that’s something. The truth, that part of him was hoping she’d laugh at him so he could write off his fears as superstitious idiocy, is uncomfortable enough that he tries not to think about it.

Of course, thinking about how he’s going to explain it to Bucky isn’t much better.

 

Bucky doesn’t take it well.

“Haunted,” he says in disbelief, shaking his head and curling his gloved hands around his coffee cup. “Haunted by fuckin’ _what?”_

“I don’t know. But I know it isn’t rats, Buck.”

“So rats are silly because we haven’t caught their little devious asses in, what, two weeks of trying, but a _ghost_ makes perfect sense? You are un-fuckin’-believable, Rogers.”

“You don’t have to agree with me,” Steve says, trying to sound reasonable. “I just think it’s worth pursuing all avenues.”

“You mean you’re turning into a superstitious person like your ma.”

“There’s no reason to bring her into this,” Steve says, a little bit stung. He can’t deny that if his mother hadn’t raised him on Irish tales of fairies and banshees and _sluagh,_ the restless dead, he might have taken longer to come to this conclusion, but that doesn’t mean the evidence isn’t compelling on its own.

“Do you think it’s Peggy?”

 _“No,”_ Steve says. “Of course it’s not Peggy. If anything, she’d be trying to protect us, not making things go wrong. And she gave us this house, which she certainly wouldn’t have done if she’d thought there were any problems with it.”

“So you think it’s something that came along after we moved in?”

“It would have to be,” Steve says, blind to the trap he’s walking into.

Bucky looks at him for a long time. Then he says, in a dangerously calm voice, “You think somebody I killed came back to haunt me, don’t you?”

Steve stares at him in horror. “Bucky, that literally never crossed my mind before this minute.”

“Bet you’re thinking it now, though.”

“You can’t ask a question and get angry with me for hearing it, Buck.”

“The fuck I can’t.” Bucky puts the cup down, and Steve has been doing this long enough now to recognize that as a danger sign: he’s afraid he’ll crush it if he doesn’t. “I’m doing my damnedest over here to try to get better, Steve, and meanwhile, you’re over there acting like being sad and fucked up and pissed off isn’t a normal reaction when you’ve been through terrible shit in your life. And now apparently your response is to invent a whole new problem we don’t even _have_ so you can fix that instead.”

Steve clenches his jaw. He’s self-aware enough to recognize that he’s spent his entire life responding to anybody, even Bucky, telling him not to do something by digging in his heels. On the other hand, he’s _right_ about this. “If there’s no problem,” he says, “then what can it hurt to have Natasha’s friend check it out?”

“Christ,” Bucky mutters. “You always have an answer for everything. Well, I’m putting my foot down this time, Steve. Peggy left this house to me, and I’m not letting some crazy ghost hunter person come in here and poke around at our stuff.”

“Bucky—”

“No,” Bucky says, and just for a second, the eyes facing Steve aren’t Bucky’s eyes anymore; they’re the eyes of the Winter Soldier. It puts enough of a chill down his spine that he backs off, raising his hands in mock-surrender.

“Okay,” he says, and once again, part of him is relieved that Bucky has saved him from explaining this to one more person who might have told him he was crazy. A larger part of him, though, is just getting more worried with every hour that passes. This is the feeling of waiting for the go signal before a mission; there’s a job to be done, and he wants to get on with doing it.

 

Steve tries hard to keep in mind all the good advice Sam has given him: _Barnes is going to have good and bad days like anybody else, and don’t be surprised if he starts having more of the bad ones. Even people who_ don’t _have a traumatic history get depressed when the days get shorter. If he lets you know he’s struggling, it’s a good thing; means he trusts you enough to let you see him bleed._ It’s easy for Sam to say, and it’s easy for Steve to nod and agree, but it’s not so easy to do. And Bucky definitely has hit a rough patch: he’s been twitchy and skittish for days, more than he’s been since they first got back on American soil, and he doesn’t seem to be sleeping well. Steve does his best not to let on that he’s worried, but his sense that something is looming only gets worse, and when it blows up, it blows up hard.

Steve is spending the lovely autumn afternoon out in the side yard, tinkering with the DeSoto’s engine, until he shuts the hood and jumps three feet when he finds Bucky standing on the other side of the car, glaring at him accusingly. “Jeez, Buck, you sure know how to startle a guy,” he says, and then Bucky’s expression registers. “What’s wrong?”

“Put it back,” Bucky says, and stomps back into the house.

Steve looks after him for a long moment, then wipes the engine grease off his hands and follows him through the kitchen door. “What—” he starts to ask, but Bucky is already pointing at a gleaming chef’s knife on the counter, next to the pumpkin they brought home from the farmers’ market with a vague idea that Steve could carve it and put it on the stoop for Halloween.

“I don’t understand,” he says, although he is surprised. Bucky’s gotten better about picking up a steak knife during meals, but he rarely goes near the knife block.

“Put. It. Back,” Bucky says, his voice low and cold.

Steve looks back at him, baffled. “You think I put that there?”

“Oh, ha ha, very funny, your damn ghost is fucking around in the kitchen now.”

Bucky’s skepticism is almost enough to make Steve wonder if he _did_ leave the damn thing out when he emptied the dishwasher. He picks up the knife and slides it back into its slot. “Okay?” he says, but Bucky has already vanished into the living room. He sighs and goes back outside.

Fifteen minutes later, when the kitchen door bangs open and Bucky shouts, “You fucking asshole,” Steve has a sinking feeling that he knows what it’s about. And sure enough, when he goes inside, another knife—the long curved one, he doesn’t know what that one’s called—is on the counter.

“Jesus Christ, Steve, this isn’t a game,” Bucky says, through clenched teeth. “I could hurt somebody.”

Steve can feel the color bleeding out of his face. “Swear on Ma’s grave, Bucky, I’m not doing this.”

“Fuck you,” Bucky says, and starts to leave the kitchen again.

Steve grabs his left arm, and there’s a moment of genuine tension when he honestly isn’t sure Bucky _won’t_ punch him. When he shoves his clenched right fist into his pocket, Steve says, “Watch me,” puts the knife back, and crosses the room to put his hand on the door handle. “Better?” he says.

“No, it is not fucking better, Steve. You have no right to try to push me to get better on your schedule.”

“Bucky, you’re being ridiculous,” Steve says. “What do you even think I’m trying to do?”

“Get me to pick up those fucking knives,” Bucky says, exasperated. His right hand is gripping the kitchen table so hard that his knuckles are white. “Look, I know it doesn’t make sense to you, but this is serious shit for me.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, consciously relaxing his own hands, which desperately want to curl into fists even though there’s absolutely nothing to punch, “I’m not like your Hydra handlers. If you ask me to stop, I’ll always stop. But this isn’t me.”

“Well, it sure as fuck ain’t me,” Bucky says, and then stops, eyes wide, like something even worse than a ghost has just occurred to him. “I’m not taking them out and _forgetting_ about it,” he says. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Bucky, I didn’t say you—”

“I didn’t,” Bucky says, and now his breathing is ragged and his eyes are filled with panic. “I’m not—I’m not slipping. I’m not losing time anymore, I got _past_ that, I’m _over_ that. That hasn’t happened since before I left D.C.”

“Bucky…” Steve reaches out and puts his hand on Bucky’s right arm, but Bucky jerks away like it’s hot, bringing his left arm up to shield himself.

After all the progress he thought they were making, all the trust he’s been trying so hard to build, Steve is utterly stunned by this turn of events. It must show on his face, too, because both of them freeze, staring at each other wide-eyed, in a silence that’s only broken by a wet _splorch_ ing sound behind them.

If he had even a little less combat experience, Steve doesn’t know that he’d be able to force himself to breathe. He turns and looks at the counter, and they both see it at the same moment: this time, it’s the butcher’s knife that’s out of the knife block, and all but the last inch of the blade has been driven cleanly through the pumpkin’s shell.

Steve looks at Bucky, who’s gone chalky pale, and the phrase that crosses his mind is inevitable: _he looks like he’s seen a ghost._

“Call Widow’s weird shit guy,” he says, and stomps out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.


	5. Chapter 5

Although it’s a hell of a coincidence that he phones Steve exactly ten minutes after Bucky changes his mind, Natasha’s weird shit guy sounds surprisingly normal on the phone. He’s perfectly pleasant, but there’s a no-nonsense undertone to his voice as he sets an arrival time and informs Steve that, no, he won’t need to be picked up from the train station; he’ll arrange his own transport. 

It’s only after the doorbell rings that Steve realizes he never actually gave the guy an address. Maybe Natasha gave it to him and maybe she didn’t, but Steve consciously decides not to ask; he’s got enough weirdness in his life right now without chasing down more of it.

He’s expecting one of the long-haired, scruffy types he’s seen around the Village, but the man on the doorstep has salt-and-pepper hair and a well-groomed beard that’s vaguely reminiscent of Tony’s. If he was wearing a suit and tie, Steve would pass him on the street without looking twice; given that every fashion choice he doesn’t understand seems to fall under the umbrella of “hipster,” and therefore acceptable, he can’t really look askance at the long, tunic-like shirt or the boots, either. Steve has, however, never seen an ordinary person on the street pulling off a red cloak before. He’ll have to tell Thor; maybe he’s inspired a fashion trend. “Hi,” he says, swinging the door wide and holding out his hand. “Steve Rogers.”

“Stephen Strange,” the man introduces himself. He’s got a good firm handshake, but Steve notices the faint tremor in his fingers as he pulls back. Both of his hands are laced with lines of knotted white scar tissue. “And yes, that is what it says on my birth certificate.” 

“You get that a lot, huh?” Steve smiles. The weird shit guy doesn’t smile back, but Steve gets the feeling he shouldn’t take it personally. Strange seems to have a serious turn of mind. “Come on in, Mr. Strange.”

“Doctor,” Strange corrects.

“Oh. Uh, sorry, but would it be okay if I introduced you as Stephen? My roommate has this thing about doctors.”

“I can hear you, asshole,” Bucky calls from the other room, and Steve winces as he comes through the doorway with Dodger in his arms. He sets her down and she runs to Strange, giving him an enthusiastic sniffing before sitting up on her haunches and bumping her front paws up against his thigh. Strange pats her, making a visible effort not to recoil as she slurps his scarred hand, before Bucky whistles her back to his side. “Okay,” he says, shifting his weight just enough to take on an air of potential menace, “just so we’re clear on this, you’re here because Steve wants you here, not because I do. But Dodger thinks you’re all right, so you can stay.”

“Bucky,” Steve chides. With the exception of him and Sam, who can both take it, Bucky usually isn’t so blatantly rude. But Strange doesn’t look offended; far from it, he looks more than a little sympathetic. 

“What do we do, Mr. Barnes,” he says, “when we realize that what we believe in has failed us?”

Bucky blinks. “What did Widow tell you about me?” he says flatly.

“Very little,” Strange says. “She’s not a particularly talkative woman. But I recognize a kindred spirit when I see one, Mr. Barnes. I’ve stood in your shoes. I trusted my life to science, dedicated myself to the practice of medicine, only to have it let me down when I needed it most.” He raises his hands, giving Bucky a good look at both the tremor and the scars; Steve doesn’t think Bucky is even conscious of tucking his own gloved hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “When that happened, I had two choices: give in to despair, or seek answers elsewhere. What I found wasn’t always... comfortable. Once, I complained to my teacher that none of what I’d learned made any sense. Her answer was, ‘Not everything needs to.’ ”

Bucky looks at Strange speculatively for a long moment. Then he nods. “Okay,” he says. “Go do your weird shit, weird shit guy.”

_ “Bucky,”  _ Steve says, but the look Strange shoots him is definitely amused as he walks deeper into the house. 

 

Strange’s process is, well, strange. He moves slowly through the house, stopping in every room to walk in a slow clockwise circle, make some hand gestures, mutter something in a language Steve doesn’t recognize, and then do it all again counterclockwise. Steve was, frankly, expecting something more bell, book, and candle and less Tony-stuck-on-a-project-that-probably-involves-robots. After a while Strange looks at him with barely controlled annoyance and says, “You don’t have to watch,” and Steve takes the hint and goes back to the living room, where Bucky is on the couch with a blanket around his shoulders and Dodger on his lap.

“So,” Steve says, taking a seat and putting Bucky’s feet in his lap, “are you sure you want to trust Dodger as your primary judge of character these days? I mean, look how much she hates the poor FedEx guy who’s never done anything to her but leave boxes on the porch.”

Bucky huffs. “We both know the FedEx guy’s gonna turn out to be Hydra, Steve.”

Steve grins, but his heart isn’t in it. “What was Strange talking about when he said you’d been let down?” he asks.

Bucky abruptly breaks eye contact, looking at a spot somewhere over Steve’s right shoulder instead. “I don’t know,” he says.

As gently as he can, Steve says, “Bucky, you know I love you, but you’re lying.”

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Was it the Army?”

“Yeah, let’s go with that,” Bucky says, clearly troubled. And then, just like that, it comes crashing down on Steve what he  _ really  _ means.

“It was me, wasn’t it?” he says. “I was the one who failed you.”

“For fuck’s sake, Steve,” Bucky says, emphatically enough that Dodger raises her head and whimpers. “He was talking about science, okay? We’d spent our whole lives waiting for something to make you healthy, and you got the thing, and I thought, this is what all those pulp novels about building cities on the moon and shit were talking about, you know? This…” He gestures at Steve’s body, right-handed. “I fucking loved it that we were working for the Strategic  _ Scientific  _ Reserve. Remember all those Hydra bases we busted up and took all their research back to Stark? Half of what kept me sane in the War was thinking that maybe all that stuff would help other people somehow. And then Hydra took it right back again, all that brainpower and all that work, and they used it to make helicarriers and super-assassins. So, no, it wasn’t you I lost faith in, okay? You know if you hadn’t pulled me off that table at Krausberg, I wouldn’t’ve lived long enough to  _ be  _ on that goddamn train, so stop with the guilt already.”

Steve hears him, but he isn’t sure he believes it. And of course he should leave it, but somehow he can’t. “I should have looked for you,” he says. 

“No, you shouldn’t have.”

“You would have looked for me.”

“Steve,” Bucky says, voice strained. “Don’t dredge this up right now. It’s bad enough having a stranger in the house.”

Bucky is getting agitated, and Steve can feel his own pulse rate rising in response. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not trying to hurt you, I just—I don’t know how to fix any of this.”

“I don’t want you to fix it. I just want you to listen.”

“I’m listening.”

“If you were listening, you’d stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop trying to fix everything all the time. God, sometimes I think you’ve been fighting for so long, you don’t even know  _ how _ to stop,” Bucky says, and that’s when there’s a sudden crash from across the room. 

Dodger leaps up with a yelp and starts barking furiously, and Steve jumps up to look as well, but he already knows what made that noise. It was his shield, which he set on the mantel when they moved in. It was only supposed to be there until he found a place to store it where he could grab it in a hurry; Bucky even joked about the red-white-and-blue eyesore junking up an otherwise painfully tasteful collection of knickknacks that Peggy must have collected from all around the world. The shield has toppled over and fallen off the mantel, taking with it a handful of porcelain figurines, what used to be a gorgeous glass vase, and a figure of a leaping panther carved out of black soapstone. 

Steve is staring at the shattered mess when Strange says, from the living room doorway, “Well. That certainly was instructive.”

Bucky is on his feet now, too, panting, cringing back from Strange’s voice like he’s been burned. “What the fuck is going on in this house?” he demands, and Steve wonders if Strange, who only met Bucky today, has any sense of how much naked fear his voice holds.

Strange looks at Bucky, at Dodger—now hiding behind Bucky’s legs—and finally, at Steve. “Perhaps you’d like to discuss this in the dining room,” he says, and Bucky hauls Dodger into his arms again and follows Strange like he can’t wait to get away. Steve shoots a glance at the shield, lying facedown on the floor in the ruined fragments of what used to be the story of someone’s life, and tries not to think too hard about that before he also follows them.

 

“Are you familiar with the term ‘poltergeist,’ Mr. Barnes?”

Bucky frowns. “Well,  _ geist  _ is  _ ghost,  _ obviously,” he says, and Steve feels that same twinge he always does when he remembers that Bucky speaks fluent German now, far beyond what the two of them picked up out of necessity during the War. “And  _ polter  _ is… like  _ polten?  _ Noisy?”

“Exactly so,” Strange says. “Although most people recognize the term from the movie.” When Bucky shakes his head, he says, “Good. It tends to give people the mistaken impression that they’re dealing with something random—a hostile spirit that’s latched onto them through chance or circumstance.”

“If that’s not it, then what are we dealing with?” says Steve.

“Not a ghost,” Strange tells him, “but a psychic phenomenon. A manifestation of repressed emotion or severe trauma so intense that it functionally becomes an autonomous entity. The brain gets stuck in a fight-or-flight loop that generates a tremendous amount of mental energy, and that energy has to go somewhere.”

Steve sucks in a breath. “Can you get rid of it?” he asks, without looking at Bucky.

Strange shakes his head. “My expertise is interdimensional,” he says, “and this is a dimensional phenomenon.” When Steve looks back at him blankly, he clarifies, “It’s weird shit, but it’s not my brand of weird shit.”

“Oh,” Steve says. “So what do we do?”

“I’d think very hard about seeking psychiatric treatment,” Strange says. When Bucky’s expression turns a little sick, he says, “There’s no shame in it, Mr. Barnes. It’s very well documented that traumatic stress can cause long-term changes to the brain, and there are some remarkably effective therapies now.”

“What if that’s not an option?” Steve says. “There has to be something else we can do.”

“Unless you know someone who can manipulate mental energy, Captain Rogers, there isn’t much. Trying to banish the entity using sorcery would almost certainly do more harm than good. In the short term, a mental challenge could burn off enough of the excess energy to limit the manifestations—learning a language, maybe, or solving complex equations. But my recommendation is to treat the underlying cause instead of the immediate symptom.”

Steve looks at Bucky for a long moment, then says, “We’ll talk it over. Thank you.”

Strange frowns, but he doesn’t argue, and Steve is grateful for that. He walks him to the door—once again, Strange assures him that he doesn’t need to call a taxi, although there’s no car in the driveway—and sees him off. Once Strange is out of sight, he goes back in and finds Bucky still sitting at the dining room table, with his head down on his arms. “Hey,” he says, and takes a calculated risk in touching Bucky’s right shoulder. When Bucky doesn’t respond, he squeezes it gently, then sits down next to him. “You said you wanted me to listen,” he says gently. “I promise, Buck, if you want to talk, I’m listening.”

Bucky takes a breath and lets it out in a long sigh. “It really is all my fault,” he mumbles.

“It’s not your fault, Buck. You heard Strange: this is basically an illness. God knows you saw me through enough of those.”

“Other people go through trauma and don’t throw knives around with their brains, Steve.”

“Well, you’ve been through more than most people. Look, we haven’t come this far just to quit now. We’re going to get through this.”

“And how are we gonna do that when just being around medical people is all kinds of fucking triggering for me?” Bucky looks up at him with eyes full of pain. “I thought I was doing okay, but I was just putting all the pain somewhere else. I could’ve hurt somebody. I could’ve hurt  _ you.  _ I can’t live through that again. And now Strange comes along and tells me there’s a way to fix it, and I don’t think I’m strong enough to go through with it. Jesus, you’re gonna have to put me back in cryo just to keep me from hurting people.”

“First off, you’re stronger than you think you are,” Steve says firmly. “And second, I’m not letting anybody get hurt, including you. We’re going to fix this without a doctor.”

“But Strange said—”

“Strange said that was the best thing to do  _ unless  _ we knew someone who could manipulate mental energy,” Steve says. “Wait until you meet Wanda Maximoff.”


	6. Chapter 6

Wanda’s trip takes more planning than Strange’s, but even though he has to first explain the situation and then make all the logistical arrangements, Steve finds this one easier to handle. There’s something comforting about dealing with things as normal as taxis and train schedules. Plus, Wanda is eager to visit; she hasn’t been upstate yet, and it sounds like she’s been quietly chafing at some of Tony’s restrictions. Steve is shocked to learn that under the Accords, Wanda apparently needs permission to leave the Avengers compound, and it makes him realize how badly he’s been neglecting the rest of his friends, isolating himself here with Bucky. Still, it only takes one call, and one quiet reminder that “You promised me, Tony, anything we need,” and the next day, he’s picking up Wanda and her suitcase at the train station.

“It’s beautiful here,” she keeps saying, after he’s hugged her hello and gotten her into the car, and he grins, knowing she must have spent the whole train ride like this—nose practically pressed up against the window like a little kid, staring out at the burst of autumn colors on the trees along the Hudson. She’s been all over the world with the Avengers, but she still has a sense of wonder that reminds him of himself and Bucky as kids, taking the train to Rockaway Beach like it was on a different planet. And that, in turn, reminds him of what she’s here for, and why it’s so important to get this done.

It seems like a good idea for Wanda to spend some time with Bucky before she tried to get into his head, so she’s agreed to stay for a long weekend, which clearly makes Bucky incredibly nervous. But Wanda greets him with a smile and admires Dodger until he warms up to her, and she drops a couple of casual mentions of what Hydra did to her with masterful subtlety, letting Bucky know that while she’s happy enough to have the powers, she doesn’t appreciate how she was used and twisted in the process. Steve can actually see Bucky’s initial unease turning into wonder as it sinks in that maybe there really are other people who can relate to what he’s gone through. By the second day, when they all pay a visit to the farmers’ market, Steve is pleasantly surprised to hear him introducing her to the locals as “our friend Wanda.”

“So how does your weird shit work?” he asks her, with what Steve recognizes as carefully feigned nonchalance, as they’re walking back to the house. “I mean, I probably wouldn’t understand _how_ you do it, I get that, but what’s it like on the receiving end?”

Wanda pauses, leaning down to pick up a brilliantly orange oak leaf from the ground. She twirls it between her fingers as she starts walking again. “I know how to call up your fears,” she finally says. “The ones underneath, the—” She glances at Steve for the word.

“Subconscious,” he supplies, trying not to think about the fact that she did that to him once.

“Subconscious, yes. I can see what you see, but I don’t make it. You do, the same way you make a nightmare. I just bring it to the surface.”

Bucky looks wary. “I hope there’s more to it than that,” he says. “Because there’s some stuff in my head you might not want to see.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Wanda says. “I’m sure I’ve seen worse.”

“No,” Bucky says softly, “you haven’t.”

Dodger looks up at him from the end of her leash and whines, and he gets down to his haunches to pet her, giving Wanda a moment to meet Steve’s eyes over his head. Steve hopes the look he gives her is more reassuring than he thinks. He’s itching to jump in, to help, but anything he could say would do the opposite. Eventually she goes on, “I don’t think it needs to be too bad. Natasha’s friend said the problem was a kind of energy. You can’t destroy energy, but you can move it.”

“You talked to Strange?” Steve says. “What did you think of him?”

“He was… interesting,” Wanda says. “I don’t think he’s as smart as he thinks he is, but still very smart. But you were right: what I do is different from what he does. He said he thinks the… problem… comes up when you’re angry or scared. If we provoke it just enough to make it do something, then I should be able to isolate it. I’ll try to trap it and… spread out the energy, so it can’t come back together. I’m sorry, even Strange doesn’t have good words for this.”

“Nah, you’re making it make sense to me,” Bucky says, giving her a smile that looks almost like the old, carefree one he used to put on with Steve, or with his own little sisters, when he wanted to cheer them up. It was only in retrospect that Steve ever realized how much hurt that smile could hide. “It’s like an engine that overheated. You’re gonna put a fan on it, disperse the heat.”

“That’s exactly it,” Wanda says, looking impressed. Bucky learned early on in life that letting people see how smart he was wouldn’t win him any friends—unlike Steve, who never quite shook a teachers’-pet reputation that earned him plenty of playground beatings—but all that fierce intelligence is still there, waiting.

“When can you do it?” he asks.

“If you’re ready,” Wanda says, “we can do it tonight.”

 

“I’m really fucking scared about this,” Bucky confesses, in a low voice. He’s sitting cross-legged on the library floor; Steve thinks they should be anywhere _but_ a room full of potential flying projectiles for this, but Wanda overruled him, saying that if things get too bad, Bucky should be able to open his eyes and see the place where he feels safest.

“I’m a little scared myself,” Steve says.

“Bullshit. You’ve never had the sense to be scared a day in your life, even when you were a tiny baby punk taking on guys three times your size,” Bucky says, and while it’s absolutely untrue, Steve still smiles back at him. One more small pretense for Bucky’s sake isn’t going to hurt anybody.

Wanda comes back, carrying a candle in a metal holder, and takes a seat across from Bucky. “Ready?” she asks.

“God, no, but like I told Steve, I’m done running,” Bucky says, and Wanda nods and sets the candles out, then lights them with a match from the stash under the sink. “We really need that?” he asks warily. “I thought it’d be less… witchcrafty, no offense.”

“It’s a meditation technique,” Wanda says. “Watch the flame and clear your mind as much as you can.”

Even with the red flame of the candle lighting his face, Bucky looks very pale. Steve gives his right hand a squeeze, and Bucky squeezes back, then lets go, lets out a long breath, and fixes his eyes on the flame. After a moment, a soft red glow rises around Wanda, and she reaches across to take both of his hands in hers.

Bucky shivers, even though he’s bundled up in half the clothes he owns, as usual. Steve glances at Wanda for permission, then puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “I’ve got you,” he says, “I won’t let you hurt anyone, and I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

“She has to hurt me for this to work,” Bucky spits through clenched teeth. “Let her do her thing, Steve.”

Steve draws back, and Bucky closes his eyes. Wanda’s face takes on a look of intense concentration, and although the window is closed—and the new latch Steve installed is a heavy-duty one meant for storm shutters—her hair stirs as if there’s a breeze moving through the room. Then Bucky gives a sharp gasp, and his eyes snap open.

“Bucky,” Steve says, but Bucky shakes his head, holding out his metal hand in a keep-away gesture.

“It’s okay. I got this,” he says.

“Buck—”

“I _got_ this, Steve.” Bucky looks at Wanda. “Did anything happen?”

“Nothing I wasn’t doing,” Wanda says, and Bucky slumps a little.

“Okay,” he says. “Guess you gotta show me something worse this time.”

“Don’t make it too—” Steve begins, but Bucky and Wanda both glare at him, and he shuts his mouth.

The second time has even less of an effect. The red glow around Wanda is brighter, but the wind doesn’t kick up, and after a moment Bucky opens his eyes and Wanda shakes her head. “Fuck,” he says, and takes a deep breath. “Wanda,” he says, “you gotta show me the day I died.”

“No, Buck,” Steve says, reflexively, but Bucky is already scowling at him.

 _“Yes,_ Steve. It’s the most scared I ever was, even counting when Zola had me. Do you want us to be here all night, or do you want to go right to the thing that’s sure to get a reaction out of this fucking ghost in my head so we can all be done with this shit?”

Steve can’t argue with that. God, he wishes he could. “All right,” he says, “then bring me along.”

They both look at him, and Bucky says, “What?”

“Let me in on the vision. You can do that, can’t you, Wanda? If you can see what he sees, can you show it to me, too?”

Wanda looks startled, then uncertain; then she nods. “If it’s all right with Bucky.”

“Of course it’s not all right,” Bucky says, looking defeated. “But the one memory I can guarantee you’re not gonna find in my head is one of me ever talking this asshole out of anything he decided to do.” He moves over a little, and Steve takes the space beside him so that the three of them make a circle. Wanda takes his left hand and Bucky takes his right, and he closes his eyes.

The change in the air is immediate: the air isn’t just moving gently now, it’s whistling past him, and Steve decides that maybe Bucky is onto something with all those layers, because the temperature is dropping fast. Then there’s a sickening sense of vertigo, and—

He’s never seen the train from this angle before.

 _His hands—Bucky’s hands, his real ones, both of them—are latched onto a flimsy metal bar on the side of the boxcar, and the weight of his body and his gear, combined with the speed of the train, leave him helpless to do anything but hold on, literally, for dear life. He’s not thinking about dying, because there’s no_ room _to be scared of death; there’s only a trapped, panicky animal instinct beating_ don’t fall, don’t fall _like a drum inside his head. Then Steve’s own voice yells, “Bucky!” and he looks up to see himself inching along the outside of the train._

_“Grab my hand,” long-ago Steve orders, and Bucky’s hand reaches out, almost close enough to brush Steve’s fingertips, and if Steve was an inch closer—but he isn’t, he isn’t an inch closer, and then there’s a sickening jolt as the bar tears loose—_

“That’s not right,” Bucky says, and Steve is jolted back to the library when the vision comes crashing down around him.

No, it’s not just the vision that shatters: it’s the library window. Wanda shrieks—Wanda, who isn’t afraid of anything—and Steve moves without thinking, throwing his body between his friends and the flying glass. It stings, but that doesn’t matter; he’ll heal. The part that makes his whole body go cold is that after the glass hits the ground, the shards keep moving, shivering and vibrating into clusters on the hardwood floor as if drawn into position by magnets. He almost screams himself when he realizes that the glass chips—some of them bloody, now—are forming themselves into a pattern of five-pointed stars.

“Stop,” he shouts at Wanda, “this is too much, you have to make it stop,” and she cries, “I can’t,” and meanwhile, Bucky has seen the pattern too, and he’s scrambling up from the floor, backing away from the glass with a wild-eyed look. Steve has just enough time to wonder if he’s about to bolt—and to remember that the last time Bucky started running, he ran all the way to Bucharest—but even as he shifts his weight to move, the library door slams shut like a thunderclap.

Bucky flattens himself against the door, reaching his left hand out for the door handle, but then he’s thrown forward, onto his knees, as if something massive has hit the door from behind and knocked him sprawling. The bookcases are rattling crazily; Steve wonders if it’s possible for them to tear themselves free from where they’re bolted to the walls, then decides he can’t risk finding out. He runs to Wanda and pulls her toward the door, grabbing Bucky with his other arm. “Put up a shield,” he tells her, and her magic flares all around them, red and bright. The whole house seems to be shaking now, and Steve grabs Bucky by the shoulders, looking into his eyes. “Buck,” he says, “you’re safe, you have to _stop_ this now!”

“I can’t,” Bucky says, eyes wide with panic. “Christ, Stevie, I can’t stop it—”

“You have to! You have to try, for her sake,” Steve shouts at him, pointing at Wanda, but Bucky is already shaking his head.

“Don’t you get it yet, Stevie?” he says, his voice little more than a whisper. Then he moves forward, wrapping his arms around Steve. When the servos in the metal arm whir and the plates lock into position, Steve instinctively tries to fight the hold, his brain skipping crazily, wondering if this could be some kind of leftover Hydra programming—but Bucky isn’t trying to hurt him, only to hold him still.

“I can’t stop it, because I’m not the one doing this,” he says, very softly, into Steve’s ear. “You are.” Then Wanda comes up behind him, and her magic hits Steve hard, and everything goes black.

 

He’s in the same empty ballroom Wanda presented to him the last time she gave him a vision, and for a dizzying, terrible moment, he wonders if he’s never really left—if everything else has been a dream, including finding Bucky. But then he turns, and Peggy is there, in her blue dress and her red lipstick, and she’s looking at him with an achingly familiar mix of frustration and affection. “Well,” she says, “this is quite the pickle you’ve gotten yourself into, isn’t it?”

Steve tries to speak, but no words come out—which is funny, because he knows this isn’t real, which means his heart can’t really be hammering and his mouth can’t really be dry. “Are you…” he begins.

“Really here?” She smiles a little. “Well, if you were going to have a delusion, I imagine you could come up with a more comforting one. I’ve never been one to let you off the hook. But we’re not here to talk about you and me, are we?”

No, he guesses they’re not. “Is it true?” he asks. “Did… did I really do those things to the house? To Bucky?”

There’s a distinct look of pity in her eyes as she nods. “I’m afraid so, darling. Not intentionally, of course. But we can all be rather cruel to each other without intending it, sometimes. I’m sure you see what’s happening, don’t you?”

“No,” Steve says, but of course he does.

“You think,” Peggy says, very gently, “that Barnes would be better off without you.”

“He would be,” Steve says. He honestly hasn’t known how much he believes that until now. “I failed him so badly, Peggy.”

“Yes, I can see how you’d think so, if that’s really how you think of the train,” Peggy says. “He remembers it differently, Steve. You weren’t as close as you told yourself you were when you climbed out onto that ledge. He knows full well that you never had a chance to save him. In fact, he remembers you rather stupidly risking your life to try. He would have forgiven you long since, if he’d thought there was anything to forgive. You’re the one who can’t forgive yourself.” He hasn’t realized it, but the scene around them has been shifting: instead of the ballroom, now it’s the bombed-out pub, the one he went back to in England where he tried and failed to drink himself into a stupor and realized that he couldn’t even give Bucky a proper Irish wake. “Do you remember what I told you, the last time you were here?”

He nods. He’s never forgotten it. The funny thing is, he’s always thought of that moment in terms of Peggy trying to comfort him when he needed it most. He’s almost never thought about the actual words. “ ‘Allow Barnes the dignity of his choice,’ ” he repeats.

“Yes,” Peggy says. “And he still chooses to believe in you. Every day, he chooses it. You’re trying to protect him, I’ll give you that. But you’re doing it by trying to make him hate you, because part of you thinks that’s all you deserve. Now that you’ve seen that he _can_ live without you, you’ve gone so far as to make a ghost to drive him away, because you can’t do it yourself. I think it’s time for you to stop that nonsense, don’t you?”

Steve slumps. She’s right, of course—or he’s right, if this is really his conscience telling him what’s what. It’s just hard to hear it. “I don’t…” he begins. “I don’t know how to fix it, Peggy. I don’t want to hurt him. But this has gone so far, I don’t know how to make it stop.”

“Oh, you ridiculous man,” Peggy says. “You’ve known all along what you need to do. You just haven’t felt that you deserved it.” She reaches up and brushes a kiss across his lips, faint as a breath. “You can’t take care of anyone else if you let yourself fall apart, and even shoulders as broad as yours weren’t meant to carry the whole world alone. You won’t get the help you need for yourself. But if you do it for him, there may still be a chance for both of you.”

“Peggy, I…” Steve begins, but the vision is already fading. What’s left of the pub is starting to blur, the lines running together. The last thing he sees before he wakes up is her face.

And she’s right. He does know what he needs to do.

 

He’s on the couch in the library, and everything hurts… almost like he jumped in the way of flying glass chips and then got the breath squeezed out of him by a guy with a metal arm or something. He’s also fucking exhausted. If there’s any truth to what Strange said about building up too much mental energy, he feels like he’s let it all off in one burst, like an adrenaline surge, and now he’s barely got enough steam left to open his eyes. He does, though, because Peggy is right: it’s time for him to finally face up to the mess he’s created.

And it _is_ a mess. Bucky is moving around the room, sweeping up the broken glass; Wanda is stacking up the books that fell—which is most of them—in front of the shelves to be sorted and put back. There’s a long black scorch mark on the floor where the candle must have fallen over. It could be worse; it probably _should_ be worse, he thinks—and then he catches himself, and shakes his head. Peggy as much as told him that the first step is to stop beating himself up over everything all the time.

Well, easy for her to say. She’s not even Catholic.

He’s surprised to hear a wry little chuckle at that, and even more surprised to realize it’s his, but Bucky turns around immediately and comes over to him, setting the broom aside. “Hey, dumbass,” he says, which, oddly enough, does more to reassure Steve than anything else he could say. “Hell of a mess you made.”

“Yeah, I know.” Steve pushes himself up and makes himself meet Bucky’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Buck. You were right. It never was you doing this, and I was looking so hard for something to fix that I was making new problems of my own.”

Bucky blinks. “Did you seriously just tell me I was right?” he says. “Hey, Wanda, get over here, I wanna know who this asshole is and what he did with my Stevie.”

Steve’s smile is a little shaky, but he’s giving it his best. “What time is it?”

“Morning,” Bucky says vaguely. “You slept right through, and we figured you needed it.”

“I did. Thanks.” Steve takes a deep breath. “I think I’ve figured out a lot about the things I need, right now.”

Bucky recognizes the serious tone in his voice, because he sits next to Steve on the couch, not quite touching, but close enough to touch. “Yeah? What’re those, pal?”

“When Wanda goes back to New York,” Steve says, “I think I should go with her.”

Bucky sucks in a deep breath, but he’s making a visible effort to stay still and keep his voice even. “If you think you can just up and fucking dump me,” he begins.

“No, Buck, that’s not it at all. I love you,” Steve says. “And it’s because I love you that I… I need to sort out some of the baggage I’ve been carrying around since I came out of the ice. Maybe since even before that. Strange was right that I need some help from somebody who’s trained in this kind of thing—hell, Sam’s been telling me the same thing almost since I met him, now that I think about it. _Guilt and regret,_ he said—he didn’t say _grief_ or _anger,_ but God knows I’ve got those, too. I’ve been carrying some stuff around for so long, I don’t know how to put it down without help. I need to learn how to be something besides a soldier, and I think that’s work I have to do myself, without mixing you up in it.”

Bucky gives him a long, searching look. Then he says, “Never thought I’d see the day you put on your own mask, Rogers.”

“What?”

“When they trained us about how to use a gas mask, in England, during the war,” Bucky says, “they taught us your first priority has to be to put on your own mask, no matter what, because you can’t pull the guy next to you to safety if you’re turning into a casualty yourself. You’re the guy who always makes the sacrifices—I mean, fuck, you’re the guy who jumped on a grenade you thought was live—”

“Are you still on about that?” Steve says, forgetting, for the moment, to be grateful that Bucky’s recovered another memory.

“Yeah, and I’m right, too! Because there are situations where that’s an amazingly heroic thing to do, Stevie, but I’ve been waiting a long time for you to figure out that it’s also okay to take care of your own fucking self once in awhile. Look, this house, this town, it’s good for me. But if it’s not working for you right now—well, I want you to have what you need, and if you think you know where to find that, then that’s where you gotta be.” He pauses. “You’re not gonna cut yourself off from everybody, though, are you? Because you kinda have a history of that.”

“No. The whole point of going back to the city is that I need some people I can lean on. Tony, Pepper, Nat—they’ll all help me if I ask.” He’s going to have to swallow his pride to actually do the asking, but the stakes are too high _not_ to accept help, now. “And I’m sure Sam has some therapist buddies at the VA who’d just love to take a crack at Captain America.”

“Can I give you a hint?” Bucky says softly. “Find one who couldn’t give a fuck about Cap, but who’s real interested in helping Steve Rogers.”

“What made you think of that?” Steve asks.

Bucky shrugs. “The guy who helped me the most was the guy who saw Bucky Barnes, not the Winter Soldier. Figure he was onto something.” He leans over and squeezes Steve’s hand, quickly, like he’s trying not to lose his nerve. “Call me sometimes?”

“You sure you want an actual phone call? Sam says texting is the wave of the future.”

“It’s the wave of the last five fucking years, Grandpa Rogers,” Bucky says, rolling his eyes. “But still. Call me. That way I’ll know you’re really okay. Promise?”

“I promise,” Steve says.

Bucky stands up and starts to go back to cleaning up. Then, abruptly, he changes course and goes back to hug Steve, tightly, just for a minute. Steve is almost too startled to respond, but before he can think of anything else to say, Bucky is already out in the hall, whistling for Dodger and rattling her leash. He gets it: Bucky never was very good at goodbyes.

Bucky hasn’t come back to the house by the time he’s packed up his stuff. There’s surprisingly little of it; almost everything here is either Peggy’s or Bucky’s, almost like he never intended to collect enough belongings to settle anywhere permanently. He’ll have to take a lesson from Bucky on that: he’ll have to figure out a way to make a real space for himself, to stop running. He leaves the shield on the mantel, though. If he wants to start putting things down, that seems like the obvious place to start.

He doesn’t see Bucky again before he and Wanda get on the train. She looks at him with pity whenever she thinks he won’t notice, but he doesn’t say anything, because there’s nothing much to say, really. But when the train pulls out of the station, he closes his eyes and tries to fill himself up with the hope that this time, he’s leaving all his ghosts behind for good.


	7. Chapter 7

There’s nothing special about the day it happens. It’s a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, and Steve has followed his Tuesday routine to the letter, although he keeps it all in his head, not taped to the fridge: a run with Sam just after dawn, then his mid-morning coffee date and language lesson with Natasha, lunch with Tony, and an art class at NYU in the afternoon. When he hears the text alert on his phone, he wipes orange paint off his hands and picks it up, expecting the latest snarky observation from Tony or another dog meme from Clint, but it’s neither of them: it’s from Bucky, and it says, **I’m in town today. You free for dinner?**

“Hey, you okay?” Lyta, the theater major who sits next to him, asks, and he isn’t sure how to answer.

“Have you ever felt like you got punched in the stomach, but in a good way?” he asks, and she laughs, pushing a lock of bright pink hair out of her eyes and leaving a streak of cobalt blue across her forehead.

“Only every time I’ve ever been in love, my friend,” she says, and that gives him more than enough to think about as he packs up his brushes and heads out.

Bucky knocks on his apartment door a few minutes early, which is good, because it gives Steve less time to work himself into a nervous frenzy about whether this is a date, what Bucky would have braved a train ride into the city alone for, and how much of an ass he’s inevitably going to make of himself over dinner. But when he swings the door open, his heart lifts a little. Bucky looks good—healthy, well-groomed, wearing a new coat and clothes that don’t look like he stole them off someone’s laundry line. He’s also got a bag of takeout food that smells delicious. “I was getting kind of people’d out and I didn’t think I could handle sitting in a restaurant,” he says sheepishly. “Is Thai okay?”

“You know it’s my favorite. Come in.”

He sets the table for two while Bucky hangs up his coat and stomps snow off his boots, then looks around the little apartment. Seeing it through Bucky’s eyes, Steve is glad he managed to hang some pictures and remembered to water the plant.

“Thought you couldn’t afford a place in Brooklyn,” Bucky says lightly.

“Well, I don’t need much,” Steve tells him. “I’m hardly ever here. I’ve been taking some classes, like Strange said. Painting, drawing, photography. Looking for fresh angles for a photo is a good excuse to go out and see the sights, talk to people. Oh, and Natasha’s teaching me Russian. It’s a hell of a language.”

“I know. No definite articles. What’s that about?” Bucky agrees, crossing the room and starting to unpack the food. “So, uh… Nothing weird, then?”

“Nothing paranormal so far,” Steve says, and pretends he doesn’t see Bucky’s shoulders drop just a little with relief. “The antidepressants are helping. So’s the therapy. I’m down to twice a week now.”

“I’m still trying to work my way  _up_ to once a week,” Bucky says. “Took me forever to start going, and it’s still fucking exhausting every single time, but yeah, it helps. And I’m taking Dodger to this class to get her certified as a therapy dog. It’s been good. Met another vet who’s got some of the same stuff I do. I mean, not the brainwashing, obviously, but the PTSD and some other stuff. We get coffee sometimes, after.”

“Oh,” Steve says, carefully neutral. “Think that’ll go anywhere?”

“With Tricia? Well, I’ve met her wife, so probably not,” Bucky says, with a faint laugh. “Besides, I kind of already have this big blonde meatball I’m in love with.”

Steve turns and looks at him, and Bucky turns slightly pink under his gaze, but doesn’t look away. “How can you still want me around after what I did to you?”

Bucky raises his metal hand, palm up, in a _how dumb can you possibly be_ gesture, and Steve frowns. “That was different,” he clarifies. “That wasn’t really you.”

“It was as much me as the poltergeist thing was you,” Bucky says. “But you fought to get me back anyway. Love doesn’t make sense, Rogers. But it’s like Strange said: not everything has to. And we’ve both worked too hard to come back from what happened to us to let a little weird shit get in the way of us being happy.”

“A little weird shit?” Steve repeats, eyebrow raised. “Is that really how you think of what happened this fall?”

“Oh, please,” Bucky says. “One lousy psychic manifestation is _nothing._ Do you have any idea how much small-town crazy you’ve missed these last couple months? I haven’t even told you about the thing with Mrs. Vernon and the chickens yet.”

Steve allows himself a tiny smile. “So if we tried this again, what would it look like?”

“I was thinking I could take the train down here once or twice a week, and you could come up to the house on the weekends,” Bucky says. “When we’re here, I can go to museums or the library if you’re busy, and when we’re there, we can go to the farmers’ market and work on the car. And maybe… after a while… maybe we could both move our stuff into the big bedroom.”

“Even with the sightlines?”

“Even with the sightlines. Although we might have to cut down the oak tree. It’s way too easy to climb.”

“Well,” says Steve, “I never really liked that tree anyway.”

He’ll never be sure which of them moves first, but suddenly he has his arms around Bucky, and Bucky is squeezing back. His metal arm is still cold from being outside—Steve can feel the chill seeping through his shirt—but the rest of him is warm, and it’s more than enough just to hold each other for a while, to know that he has Bucky and Bucky has him and all the ghosts in the world couldn’t come between them.

 

“Did either of us remember to put the food in the fridge before… this?” Steve asks. Bucky’s body is stretched out across his, his dark hair fanned across Steve’s chest. “It’s been a couple hours. If we left it out, it’s probably not safe to eat anymore.”

“Who cares,” Bucky mumbles sleepily. “We can always order more.”

“Oh? What happened to ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’?”

“This is different. Now you’re buying.”

Steve smiles. “You’re gonna have to let me get up and get my phone, then,” he says, and when Bucky makes a low sound of protest, he adds, “If we even have time for dinner, that is. Don’t you need to get home to Dodger?”

“Huh? Nah. You know Raina from the farmers’ market? She does some dogsitting on the side, and she said she’d keep Dodger until tomorrow.”

Steve looks at him, suddenly suspicious. “What did you have to come into the city for, anyway?”

Bucky tilts his head back just enough to grin up at him. “This.”

“You came all this way before you even knew if I’d say yes? What were you gonna do if I didn’t answer my texts?”

“I dunno. Stand under your window looking sad and throw pebbles until you let me in.”

“Really? You thought that would work?”

“No, but I thought the jeans that show off my amazing ass might.”

Steve rolls his eyes and says, fondly, “Jerk.”

“Punk,” Bucky replies, and nestles down against Steve’s chest, clearly not intending to move again any time soon.

He doesn’t have to. They’re not quite sleeping with all the windows open yet, but Steve believes that they’ll get there. The apartment is quiet, there’s nothing to be afraid of, and it almost doesn’t matter where they finally end up, Brooklyn or the house upstate or somewhere else entirely: when he’s with Bucky, he’s already home.


End file.
